To Say That Those Spanish
Children Were As Tenderly Watchful Of These Spanish Babies As English
Children Is To Say Everything.
Now and then a mother cared for a babe as
only a mother can in an office which the
Pictures and images of the Most
Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle
is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms
and crooned whatever was the Spanish of -
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b'ar;
Rack back, baby, see it hangin' thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our
backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and
hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic
joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a
hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came
to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and
ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads
were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been
gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the one
beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional
shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened
away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with
flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and
the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the
foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives
heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday
breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside;
our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was
"bad."
VII
We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we
met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and
very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came
to the village that was a _municipium_ under Augustus and a _colonia_
under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and
self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio
Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we
glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide
flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless,
but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place
a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing
it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not
meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked
our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had
seen prettier.
At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the
tourist's chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened
toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus
flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us
into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian who
took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through the
moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the
amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off
from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity
of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something
august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the
Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced
the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth,
but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them
which restored the vision of the "grandeur that was Rome" pretty well
over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our
custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old
Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish
was so slight and his _patois_ was so dense that the best we could do
was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of
English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, "Lion,
lion, lion," cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid
community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell
us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The
poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free of
a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as
could not be bought for money in New York.
Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church
of San Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that
Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I say
better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected the love of
a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors slay his son rather
than surrender a city to them. But I could only pay honor to her
pathetic memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of hers who
rushed into the flames to right the garments on the form which the wind
had blown them away from, and so perished with her. We had to take on
trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three
emperors were born, and whose "palaces, aqueducts, and temples and
circus were magnificent." We had bought some of the "coins daily dug
up," but we intrusted to the elements those "vestiges of vestiges" left
of Trajan's palaces after an envious earthquake destroyed them so lately
as 1755.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 76 of 101
Words from 76918 to 77934
of 103320
