This Seems The Crevice Where I Can Crowd In The Fact That Bits Of Family
Wash Hung From The Rail
Of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside
the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade
Near a
doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of that very custodian. At
the same time I must not fail to urge the reader's seeing the Columbian
Museum, which is richly interesting and chiefly for those Latin and
Italian authors annotated by the immortal admiral's own hand. These give
the American a sense of him as the discoverer of our hemisphere which
nothing else could, and insurpassably render the New World credible. At
the same time they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the
throat at the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him
from history and make him at home in the beholder's heart, and there
seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume most abounding
in marginalia should be _Seneca's Prophecies._
The frequent passing of men as well as women and children through our
Plaza San Fernando and the prevalence of men asleep on the benches; the
immense majority of boys everywhere; the moralized _abattoir_ outside
the walls where the humanity dormant at the bull-feast wakes to hide
every detail of slaughter for the market; a large family of cats basking
at their ease in a sunny doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker
muzzles, led by a milch cow from door to door through the streets; the
sudden solemn beauty of the high altar in the cathedral, seen by chance
on a brilliant day; the bright, inspiriting air of Seville; a glorious
glimpse of the Giralda coming home from a drive; the figure of a girl
outlined in a lofty window; a middle-aged Finnish pair trying to give
themselves in murmured talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the
Ambassadors in what seems their wedding journey; two artists working
near with sketches tilted against the wall; a large American lady who
arrives one forenoon in traveling dress and goes out after luncheon in a
mantilla with a fan and high comb; another American lady who appears
after dinner in the costume of a Spanish dancing-girl; the fact that
there is no Spanish butter and that the only good butter comes from
France and the passable butter from Denmark; the soft long veils of pink
cloud that trail themselves in the sky across our Plaza, and then
dissolve in the silvery radiance of the gibbous moon; the yellowish-red
electric Brush lights swinging from palm to palm as in the decoration of
some vast ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a failure to
reach the church we set out for; the droves of brown pigs and flocks of
brown sheep; the goatherds unloading olive boughs in the fields for the
goats to browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful village, with an English
factory in it, and a mansion of galvanized iron with an automobile
before it; a pink villa on a hillside and a family group on the shoulder
of a high-walled garden; a girl looking down from the wall, and a young
man resting his hand on the masonry and looking up at her; the good
faces of the people, men and women; boys wrestling and frolicking in the
village streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of sudden holes; the
heat of the sun in the first November week after touches of cold; the
tram-cars that wander from one side of the city street to the other, and
then barely miss scraping the house walls; in our drive home from our
failure for that church, men with trains of oxen plowing and showing
against the round red rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the
crimson-hulled steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields;
the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our
return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot with
bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions from my
note-book which each and every one would expand into a chapter or a
small volume under the intensive culture which the reader may well have
come to dread. But I fling them all down here for him to do what he
likes with, and turn to speak at more length of the University, or,
rather the University Church, which I would not have any reader of mine
fail to visit.
X
With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange
peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in the _patio_
play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play
in our own land. While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it
and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait for
the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found the
booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise of
recitation from the windows looking into the _patio_ followed us
up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed
library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities of
some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One, who
seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the
place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long,
for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the
books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty
thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without
examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value
was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to
unlock it.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 80 of 101
Words from 81129 to 82133
of 103320
