Dagonet Abroad

You can imagine that, under these circumstances, there is very little kept back. The passengers beg and pray of each other to conceal nothing. As soon as a complete surrender has been made, the brigands raise their hats again, and bid the passengers farewell in these words, ‘Vaya ustedes con Dios!'—‘May you go with God!'—and, as the train moves off, they add, with beautiful and simple piety, ‘And may we all meet again some day in God’s big parlour!’

These dignified and solemn Spanish salutations are universal among the people, and are never omitted. Your beggar in Spain is a gentleman, and you address him always in formal and courteous language. ‘Brother,’ you say, when he importunes you, ‘may God put it into your heart to deprive me of the pleasure of your society!’ To your waiter, to the servant, to the boy who blacks your boots, your language must never be curt. At the table d’hôte in Spain, high-born gentlemen and the officers talk as much with the waiter as they do with each other. He joins in the general conversation; and I have heard an ex-Spanish Minister gravely discussing the political situation with the waiter who was handing round the dishes. Sometimes the guests agreed with the waiter, and sometimes with the ex-Minister.

A word about the accommodation for travellers in second-rate Spanish towns off the beaten track before I hurry away from the gayest and brightest capital in all Europe, and go on to Seville. English travellers are frightened from visiting many small Spanish towns by tales of bad accommodation, vile cooking, and uncivilized ways. My personal experience proves the contrary. In many places off the beaten track I was excellently housed and fed, and every Spaniard with whom I came in contact put himself out of his way to make my path one of roses. But I didn’t walk about rooms with my hat on; I didn’t cross the high altar in churches without bowing my knee; and I didn’t turn my nose up at all the dishes, and say ‘Faugh!’ and I didn’t call the servants and the proprietor ‘d.f.'s’ because they didn’t understand English. The English who come abroad do much to bring about the incivility with which they are sometimes treated. The off-hand, imperious, insular manner is not understood in a country where the beggars address each other as ‘Your excellency’ and ‘Your lordship.’ Instead of finding fault with everything Spanish, praise everything, say you like everything, and flatter instead of abusing your hosts, and you will find the Spaniards, from the highest to the lowest, vying with each other as to which can show you the greatest courtesy.

The courtesy of the servants in Spanish hotels is wonderful. Every waiter, every chambermaid, rises when you pass, and bows and remains standing till you are out of sight. Your coachman remains bareheaded while you get into your carriage. In country places all the drivers you meet on the road raise their hats and wish you all that is good.

In the best hotels a staff of servants sit on sofas on each landing waiting to attend to the summons of the guests. If you walk up and down your corridor for half an hour, every time you pass that sofa the servants will rise and remain standing till you have passed.

In little out-of-the-way towns at table d’hôte, if a lady comes into the room all the gentlemen at the table rise and bow to her, and remain standing until she is seated. When the table d’hôte is over, the men as they rise bow to those who still remain seated, and, in courtly phraseology, lay themselves at the feet of the company.

At one table d’hôte in a little town I was astonished to see a gentleman sit down in his hat and cloak, and keep them on. I made inquiries, and found that he was a Castilian grandee, and it was his privilege to remain covered. The hat in Spain is the seat of dignity. That is why you give your visitor’s hat the armchair of honour when he calls upon you.

Seville is a place one longs to see until one has seen it, and then one wonders why one wanted to see it so much. It is beautiful. I am a Philistine, a Goth, a Vandal, a dreadful creature generally, but I am always willing to admit beauty where it exists. I don’t prostrate myself and worship simply because I am told it is the proper thing to do, but anything that I like I become enthusiastic over. I can’t become enthusiastic over Seville. It is quaint and old and picturesque and pretty and lordly and interesting, and all that sort of thing, but you soon get tired of it. The climate has something to do with this, perhaps. The energy goes out of you in Seville. You saunter and put your hands in your pockets, and so in time the very laziness of the life begins to bore you. If I hadn’t heard so much about Seville it is quite possible I should have been enchanted with it. But I have heard its praises sung on the top note all my life, and so I was disappointed.

The people and the patios are the most interesting things in Seville. Artists have painted the men and women of Andalusia in their national costumes for countless ages, so that everyone is familiar with them. Comic operas and ballets by the score have shown us the dark-eyed lasses, with the coquettish comb and the mantilla, and the bright flowers in their hair, casting melting glances from behind a fan. And the songs about the Guadalquivir would bind up into a very big volume. Every Englishman is therefore prepared beforehand for Seville. I was. I got out at the station, and got into an omnibus that rattled my bones over awful stones, and jerked me up in the air, and threw me down on the floor, and reduced me to a living pulp; and, as soon as I was something between a jam and a jelly, I began to look about me.

Seville is built on the regular Moorish system. Narrow streets and houses close together to keep out the fierce heat of the sun. We go full speed through streets that leave only half an inch on each side of the bus. Foot passengers dash into doorways to shelter until we have passed. We come to streets so narrow that the horses could not pass through, let alone the bus; and so we dive up here and dive down there, and describe a circle, in order to arrive at our hotel. There are certain streets that carriages go up, and certain streets that they come down. Nothing could pass! And there are no footways. An unskilful driver who goes an inch to the right or the left chips a piece out of his vehicle by knocking it against a house.

But one thing strikes the first comer and rivets his attention. Every house, small and large, has a lovely gate of ironwork as delicate as lace, through which one sees a beautiful inner patio or marble courtyard filled with waving trees and beautiful plants. Often in the centre a splendid fountain plays. Seville is an old city of the Moors. Their handiwork is everywhere. In these houses that one passes the Moors lived their Eastern life before they were driven out by the reconquest of Spain, and so beautiful is the climate, so clear the atmosphere, that everything stands to-day just as it stood hundreds of years ago. The Moor is everywhere in this part of Spain. The people still dance the Moorish dances and sing the Moorish songs, and the blood of the Moors still lingers in their veins, the features of the Moors still survive, and make the faces that one meets full of Eastern grace and beauty.

The country all round Seville is a garden of Eden. The orange-trees, the palm-trees, and the almond-trees are everywhere. The hedges are the prickly pear and the cactus. The landscape is African in its luxuriance, and the golden sunshine floods the land with glory. But the roads! Oh, ye gods, the roads! They ought to be impossible roads; but we drove over them. They are in ruts a foot deep; they are in holes in which a man might hide himself. They have not been swept for centuries. The mud that was in heaps in the days of the Moors remains in heaps still. The dogs and cats who died by the roadside in the days of the Moors have not yet been buried. Once when I was in Seville it rained all night. The next day we drove through a sea of liquid mud. Even the roadways in front of the palaces of the rich are in great holes and full of ponds. Carriages break down, horses break their legs, visitors disappear down holes in the roadway. The Sevillians regret the circumstances; they repair the carriages, buy new horses, make new friends, but they never repair the roads. Some day the only way of getting about Seville will be by balloon. Even now it is the safest way. So much has been done for Seville by the past Moors; the present burgesses might at least keep the roads in repair.

The Guadalquivir! Another of my lost illusions. Poets have sung it from a distance—the poet who walks upon its bank holds his nose. The Guadalquivir, out of the poetry books and the songs and the romances, is a commonplace, dirty stream, about as romantic as the Thames at Barking Creek, and not so clean.

The people and the patios and the climate make Seville, and the Santa Semaña—the Holy Week!—brings thousands and thousands of people to the marmalade city. It is a week of magnificent processions—a week of such pomp and circumstance and magnificence and show as to be indescribable. All the winter long people come to Seville because it is said to be a beautiful place. During the month of the Santa Semaña they cram into Seville to see a sight which no other town in the world can show.

English swarm in Seville. At the Hotel of the Tower of Babel we sit down 180 to table d’hôte. The eighty are English and American. We speak all languages at this hotel. All day long it is a babel of French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese. We have magnificent entertainments at dinner-time. One evening a band of fifty ‘Estudiantina’ play and sing and dance for our amusement. Another evening we have professors of the guitar who serenade us. But this great caravansera of foreigners spoils Seville for me. I might be at a big hotel anywhere except in Spain. Everything is thoroughly un-Spanish. All around one hears English and French, and people dress and give themselves airs, and bring the customs and manners of London and Paris and St. Petersburg to Seville, and so spoil it. It knocks the romance out of the place to hear at every street corner, ‘Hullo, old fellow; how are you?’ and ‘Oh, Jane, did you see that funny old lady?’ or ‘Bai Jove, what a doosid pretty girl in that balcony!’ There are so many places in Spain which are ugly and purely Spanish, that one feels annoyed to come to a place which is pretty but cosmopolitan.

The great tobacco factory at Seville is one of the first sights the stranger is taken to see. It requires a certain amount of courage for a bashful man to run the gauntlet of 6,500 young ladies. Everybody in Spain smokes cigarettes. Little boys begin at the age of eight, and from that time the cigarette is rarely absent from a Spaniard’s lips. Many of them die smoking. The consumption of cigarettes is naturally enormous, and the bulk are manufactured in Seville. The Government factory gives daily employment to about 7,000 people, and of these only a hundred or two are men.

When you enter the enormous rooms crowded with girls dressed in bright colours, the coup d'œil is striking in the extreme. In one immense low-vaulted room there are 1,500 girls. They sit in endless rows—about twenty girls to a row—on either side of the room, all at little tables, all rolling cigarettes. There is a blaze and blur of colour, a babel of tongues. Every girl has a gay handkerchief about her neck—every girl has a bright flower stuck in her hair. All along the walls hang the gay outdoor dresses of the little cigarette-makers. As I walk, blushing and nervous, down an endless avenue of flashing eyes, I grow almost giddy. It is a sea of women’s faces, an undulating ocean of flower-decked heads. One has to pick one’s way carefully down the central avenue, for it is blockaded all along the line with cradles. The married cigarette-makers are allowed to bring their babies with them to the factory. They rock the cradle with one foot, while their busy fingers roll the cigarette.

‘Silence!’ is called by the forewoman as the visitor passes down the lines, but there is a ‘chut-chut’ every second from some dark-eyed wench who points to a cradle and holds out her hand. It is the habit of visitors to bestow occasional coppers on the babies, and so all the young mothers are on the alert for the visitors’ charity.

The girls earn good wages. At many of the tables whole families are working together. But the hours are long, and the atmosphere awful. The damp, warm odour of the tobacco in the long, low-roofed rooms is in itself almost stupefying. But there is no ventilation, and the atmosphere is absolutely indescribable. Many of the girls smoke cigarettes at their work. I was very glad to light one myself long before I had done the round of the factory.

I have said that cigarette-smoking is universal in Spain. Nowhere does the habit strike the foreigner more forcibly than at a funeral. Funerals in Spain are conducted in a manner which is in the highest degree original. When you die you are got rid of as soon as possible. The Spaniards have the same horror of death surroundings as the Italians, but they go a great deal further. As quickly as possible—sometimes within an hour—the body is placed in an elaborate coffin made of metal, and painted to imitate marble. Some of these ‘caskets’ are smothered in gilt ornaments of a most elaborate character. All sizes are kept ready at the great funeral establishments. The coffins open lengthways. The lid is on hinges, and is locked with a key. The poorer people are buried in wooden coffins, covered with various designs in coloured ribbons. Children’s coffins are made in white and blue, and are decorated like a bon-bon box. Coffins of this description are sold almost everywhere in the South. You see them hanging up outside the shops by dozens.

I went over the premises of one of the biggest undertaking concerns in Spain. It is a public company, and is called ‘La Funeraria.’ I never saw such magnificence in my life. Some of the funeral cars are built in the style of the great gilt and glass cars which figure in a circus procession through a country town. The drivers and footmen are dressed in gorgeous liveries that make you blink to look at them. Some of the liveries that I was shown cost over £200 each. They positively blazed with gold. A grand first-class funeral, with a retinue of footmen and officials, is a perfect Lord Mayor’s show in itself.

As a rule, the corpse, even when so magnificently conducted to its last home, is unattended by any relatives. Spaniards finish with their dead when the church ceremony is over. Few corpses are accompanied to the cemetery except by the undertaker’s men. But in ordinary cases the coffin is placed in a yellow, open car, and driven up to the cemetery by a gentleman in a short jacket and peaked cap. The driver smokes his cigarette and cracks his whip as he hums his favourite tune. I have seen dozens of these ordinary funerals in Spain, and they have always filled me with amazement. The ridiculous always lives next door to the sublime. The grotesque and the horrible are first cousins. More than once I have with difficulty restrained myself from smiling at a Spanish interment, so utterly out of keeping with English notions of decorum has the final ceremony been.

I will describe two interments that I witnessed in one day at the great cemetery at Seville. Four little barefooted boys arrive at the cemetery gates. Between them they carry a little blue and white coffin. They jog along, chatting and laughing, up the long avenue of trees. Presently they see something which attracts their attention—a bird in a tree. Down they drop the coffin by the roadside, and off they scamper across the grass to the tree. They pick up stones and begin to throw them at the bird. In the process they quarrel about something, and two of the boys have a fight. In the meantime the coffin lies in the roadway. I walk up to it, and through the glass let into the lid I see the dead child’s face. It has been dead perhaps twelve hours, so the features are unchanged, and it appears to be calmly sleeping. Several people pass me; no one takes any notice of the coffin in the road. One old gentleman nearly tumbles over it, and swears. It is evidently nothing unusual.

Presently these ragged boys, having arranged their little difference, return, and pick up the coffin. Two of them have lighted cigarettes. They carry their burthen right across the cemetery to a little house, where two or three men with brass numbers on their caps are smoking cigarettes. Here they show a paper, and one of the men, picking up a spade, tells the boys to follow him. Off they go, jogging the coffin now this way and now that, and I follow them.

We come to a long line of brick vaults. Some are empty; some are filled up to the top with what I presume to be mould. The gravedigger turns over the loose earth with his spade, and strikes a coffin here and there. The vault is too full. He moves on to another bricked square, pushes his spade in, and says there is just room. He digs a little hole and lays the coffin flush with the top of the brickwork. Then he throws a few spadefuls of earth over it from a mound close by, and the ceremony is finished. There are thousands of these bricked squares in the cemetery, and each contains a score of coffins. There is no stone over the top, only the loose brown earth. Some of them are so full that the earth has to be piled up to cover the coffin, and thus the coffin is actually above ground.

This system of burying in bricked squares saves a lot of trouble. The graves are always ready, and the dead can be brought to the cemetery and put away at once. There is no necessity to order or select beforehand. To understand this system you must see a Spanish cemetery. No written words can convey a correct impression of its general peculiarities.

The next funeral arrives as I am leaving the cemetery. A car, driven by a man smoking a cigarette, comes up. It is followed by a cab, from which alights an old gentleman, also smoking a cigarette. The car pulls up at the gate of the ‘depository,’ a little house in the grounds arranged for the reception of people who have died too late to be buried that day. The guardian of this house, cigarette in mouth, flings open the doors, speaks to the gentleman, and then calls for somebody to come. A man with a cigarette in his mouth now approaches. He and the car-driver lift out the coffin and carry it into the house and lay it on the trestles. They then light a candle at the head and foot, and come out and shut the door. Off drives the car, the man lighting another cigarette, and the gentleman to whom the corpse belongs strolls across the cemetery with the gravedigger to choose ‘his place.’ The gravedigger turns up a little earth in one brick square, and then in another. ‘Too full,’ says the gentleman, puffing his cigarette. He goes from square to square, and pokes at the loose earth with his stick. At last he settles on a square which is only half full. ‘That will do,’ he says, and then he returns to his cab and drives away.

I make inquiries of the keeper of the ‘depository.’ The body inside the coffin is the gentleman’s wife. She died last night. She will be buried to-morrow morning. ‘Will the gentleman return to see her buried?’ ‘Oh, no; he has finished. He has left her here. The rest concerns us!’ We find it difficult to understand this leaving the dead to be buried without ceremony, and without a friendly watcher; but the Spaniards think nothing of it. They bid their dead good-bye with the last prayer. The interment is no ceremony at all to them. The dead are hurried out of the house as soon as possible. Sometimes they are sent to the undertaker’s ‘depository’ within a couple of hours of their decease, and the friends see no more of them. This, with the Southern horror of a corpse, one can understand. But the cigarette-smoking of hearse-drivers, cemetery attendants, and gravediggers while handling the coffin, strikes the foreign looker-on as, to say the least of it, lacking in ordinary respect for the dead.

In many parts of Spain the death ceremonies are peculiar. The corpse is elaborately dressed in its best, and has its hair beautifully done, and a pair of new boots put on its feet. It is then got rid of as soon as possible, and all the furniture in the room is taken out and sold, or given away. Everything that can remind the family of the deceased is removed. A notice of the death is not only inserted in the newspapers, but in some cases placarded on the walls; and you are requested to go to such and such a church on such and such a day, when a mass will be said for the repose of the dead person’s soul.

Among the poor there is a very free-and-easy way of getting their dead buried. One day, outside a great cemetery, I came upon three common coffins lying on the ground near the gate. Seeing that the coffins were occupied, I started back in horror, and asked what, in Heaven’s name, such an exhibition meant. ‘Oh,’ said my Spanish friend, ‘they are poor people who cannot afford to be buried yet. There is a little fee to be paid. Someone will come by presently, and pay for the coffins to be put away as an act of charity.’

Unburied coffins are bad enough, but what do you think of dead children hung up outside the cemetery gates, waiting for some kind soul to pay for them to be put into the earth? The sight is not uncommon in the South of Spain, where every form and shape of beggary is rampant. Sometimes the friends of a small corpse, instead of asking charity, will smuggle it into the cemetery hidden under a cloak; and, when no one is looking, drop it into one of the big square graves I have told you about, and kick a little loose earth over it. There are plenty of uncoffined dead under the loose earth in the great cemetery of Seville.

Burials alive are far more common in hot countries, where the burial takes place within twenty-four hours after death, than they are in England, where one gets, as a rule, a week’s grace. In Spain the body is frequently removed to the undertaker’s shop a few hours after death. In one of the largest of these establishments in Madrid, some years ago, an extraordinary sight was witnessed. A gentleman was brought in his ‘casket’ one afternoon, and placed in the room set apart for that branch of the business. The proprietor lived over his premises, and on this especial evening was giving a grand ball. When the ball was at its height, a gentleman in full evening dress suddenly joined the company. He danced with the wife of the undertaker, and he danced with the undertaker’s daughter, and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself.

The undertaker thought he knew his face, but did not like to be rude and ask him his name; but by-and-by all the guests departed, and the strange gentleman was the only one left. ‘Shall I send for a cab for you?’ said the host at last. ‘No thank you,’ replied the gentleman; ‘I’m staying in the house.’ ‘Staying in the house!’ exclaimed the undertaker; ‘who are you, sir?’ ‘What, don’t you know me? I’m the corpse that was brought in this afternoon.’ The undertaker, horrified, rushed to the mortuary-room and found the coffin empty. His wife and daughter had been dancing with a corpse. An explanation, of course, followed. The gentleman, who had only been in a trance, had suddenly recovered, and hearing music and revelry above, and having a keen sense of humour, had got out of his coffin (the Spanish coffin closes with a lid, which is only locked just previous to interment) and joined the festive party. He was quite presentable, as in Spain the dead are generally buried in full evening dress.

Writing about funerals in Spain reminds me of a curious ceremony in connection with the burial of Spanish kings. The Pantheon in the Escorial is their last home. Here they lie in splendid marble sarcophagi in great niches, and you can walk about and see them all. Alfonso’s sarcophagus is empty as yet. The late King’s body lies on a table in an adjoining chamber—a chamber called El Pudridero, which is really a place where the royal bodies are left to undergo the natural process of decay which at last fits them to be placed in the ornamental arrangement in the Pantheon. The ceremony to which I referred above took place at the late King’s funeral. The body was brought in great state from Madrid to the Escorial, a distance of thirty miles. The ‘intendant’ of the royal palace was in charge of it. When the procession reached that gate of the Escorial which is only opened to admit a dead sovereign, the procession halted. The ‘intendant’ then went to the coffin and opened it, and exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘Don Alfonso!’ then again still louder, ‘Don Alfonso!’ and again, ‘Don Alfonso!’ He then turned to the officials, and said, ‘Don Alfonso does not answer; he is dead!’ The coffin was locked again, and the King passed on to his last home.

A note or two before I leave Seville. When I arrived in Seville, before seeing the sights, I went to a barber’s shop to have my head shampooed and to be shaved, and to be generally put straight after fifteen hours in the train. I asked my ‘Figaro’ if he was the Barber of Seville. He shook his head deprecatingly, and said, ‘No; but he was one of them.’ I explained to him that I wanted to know if he was the immortal Barber of Seville—that it was a mild joke. He said there were so many barbers in Seville. He had never heard of Count Almaviva, but he knew a Rosina. She was working in the great tobacco factory of Seville, and was very pretty. I lost my patience. I cried, ‘Great heavens, man! you are a barber of Seville, and you never heard of the Barber of Seville who is in an opera known all over the world?’ The man thought for a little while, and then exclaimed, ‘Ah! I know what you mean now. They show a shop to tourists where a barber once lived who did something. But I didn’t know it was true about him. The guides here make so many stories for the tourists!’

I left the Barber of Seville sad and downcast. I had expected that all the time he was shaving me he would be singing the best-known airs of the opera. And he didn’t even know who Figaro was!

One more disillusion awaited me in Seville. One morning the waiter brought me for my breakfast some marmalade. ‘Ah!’ I exclaimed, ‘Seville—Seville oranges! Of course, the marmalade here is excellent.’ ‘Yes, señor,’ replied the waiter; ‘it is considered a great delicacy in Seville, because we cannot get it here. This is the best Scotch marmalade from London!’

The Andalusian dances are quite as interesting as the funerals. To see the dances in perfection you have, when there is no fête or country festival on, to go to the cafés chantants, and these establishments in Spain are only frequented by a low class of people. My companion and I put our dignity in our pockets and went to the cafés, but we had a slight difficulty in explaining to the young ladies of the establishments that we were there to see them dance, and not to drink bottles of Malaga and talk Spanish to them. The dancing of the Andalusian girls is well worth putting up with a little bad company to see. There is a good deal of the Oriental movement of the hips and arms in it; in fact, both the song and the dance of the South are Moorish, but there is also a grace and a coquettishness of a purely Spanish character. When a man and woman dance together with the castanets, and dance well, there is no prettier sight to be seen.

The men are all good dancers. The great dancer of Seville at the present moment is a butcher, one José Fernandez, surnamed ‘El Chibo’ (the little lamb). He has a fine shop on the Plaza, and is very well to do. Unfortunately he could not dance for me because he had been having a political discussion with a friend, and had received by way of argument two bullets in the chest, and so was confined to the hospital. ‘El Chibo’ is also one of the leading figures in the great procession of the Holy Week. He takes the character of a Roman general. For this occasion he has had made, at his own expense, a new and beautiful costume, for which he has paid the trifling sum of 15,000 pesetas—say, £600. You may guess that ‘El Chibo,’ the dancing butcher of Seville, is not a poor man.

The gipsy dancing of Granada is different from the Andalusian dancing. As it was not convenient for me to climb up the Alhambra Hill at night and sit in a gipsy cave, I had the gipsy dancers brought down to a house in the town by their captain, and paid for a private performance. The guide-books say that it is a ‘disgusting exhibition.’ It isn’t exactly the sort of thing a girl would take her mother to see; but ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ The gipsies dance ‘Old Africa’ and their other dances without any thought of evil. They are not refined, and many of the ‘figures’ are coarse and suggestive, but the general effect is striking, and dramatic, and picturesque. After the real Moorish dances of Africa and the Spanish dances of Andalusia, these gipsy dances of Granada are not worth going much out of one’s way to see. But the gipsies themselves are interesting, and the old gipsy captain plays the guitar like an angel. I tried to carry on a conversation in Romany with them, and I found that, taking into account the difference of the Spanish and the English pronunciation of the same word, they understood me very well indeed. I stayed with the gipsies and their captain till eleven on Saturday night, and on Sunday, at their special invitation, I went up the hills and spent an hour in their home—a cave burrowed right into the mountain, and fitted up in an exceedingly primitive style. The chief of the party I spent Sunday with is nearly seventy-six, and a hale and hearty old Gitano still. He told me that many years ago he danced with his wife before the Prince of Wales, and he asked me if he was King of England yet, if he was married, and how many children he had. I gave him the desired information, and then he asked me, if I saw the Prince of Wales when I went back to England, to give his best respects to his Royal Highness. I promised that I would, should the opportunity occur. I regret to say that up to the present moment it has not.

CHAPTER VI.

GRANADA AND THE ALHAMBRA AND CORDOBA.

The journey from Seville to Granada is a fearful affair. The distance is only 179 miles, but it takes all day. Directly you come into the province of Granada the train is besieged with beggars. At every station ragged boys leap up on the steps of the carriages and whine for alms. When you arrive at the terminus, beggars by dozens pounce upon you. You get into an omnibus to go to the town (I selected a real Spanish hotel to escape from the English), and you are rattled over stones so huge that they throw the omnibus up several feet from the ground. Suddenly you stop. You look out and find yourself in the centre of a dirty, half-lighted square. You are in the middle of the roadway. Round you dance dozens of weird forms with bare legs and arms, clad in ragged cloaks. The door is opened, and you are requested to descend. You look in vain for a hotel, and before you can ask a question your luggage is thrown off the roof into the mud. The dozen beggars scream and shout and gesticulate. One seizes your rugs, another your portmanteau, another your bag. In vain you protest and shriek to the bus-driver. In self-defence you rush after the procession of beggars who have seized your property. Then you see that they are wading through the mud on to a pavement, and that there is a hotel in the distance. The roads of Granada are so constructed that a deep ditch separates the road from the pavement. This causes everybody in a carriage to be set down in the middle of the roadway.

I followed the beggars who had seized my luggage, and found myself presently in the hotel. Here the beggars grouped themselves round me until I had been given a number, and then up they filed barefooted and dirty to my sleeping apartment. The hotel people didn’t say anything; so I presumed it was usual for the porterage of the hotel to be performed in this way. A handful of coppers relieved me of my attendants, and I counted my packages and found them all safe; but it will be a long time before I forget being turned out on a dark night in the middle of a dark square, and having all my belongings seized and carried off by the beggars of Granada.

Granada is the Alhambra! But for the Alhambra, Granada would be left to the gipsies and the mendicants. But the Alhambra makes the town the Mecca of all travelling Christians. To behold the palace on the hill, the ‘red fortress,’ the last stronghold of the Moors, it is worth while enduring a good deal more than the persecutions of the most degraded population in all Spain. As one wanders through these world-renowned ruins and gazes in admiration and awe at the glorious handiwork of a race that was swept out of Spain hundreds of years ago, one pinches one’s self to see if it is a dream or a reality. One walks upon enchanted ground. Here the genii have been at work. It is too utterly prosaic to imagine that this fairy palace was built by mortal hands. For my own part, I don’t believe it. I am as sure as I am of anything that one day a gentleman out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ was sojourning in Granada and he rubbed a ring, or muttered an incantation, and a djin appeared, and, after a short conversation, the palace and fortress of the Alhambra rose from the ground. I don’t dispute the fact that it was afterwards inhabited by mortals, that here ‘King Boabdil’ and his brave garrison were starved out, and yielded the keys to the Christian conquerors, and so passed away for ever. The splendid marble tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella stand in the Royal Chapel of Granada, and relics of the last defeat of the Moors are everywhere around. Even the banner that the Christians bore as they entered the gates of the Alhambra on January 2, 1492, still hangs, faded and tattered, in a glass case in the chapel. And near it are the crown and sceptre of their most Catholic Majesties; and in a little corner, all by itself, is a golden casket, once the property of a gentleman named Columbus, who has been handed down to posterity in connection with a yarn about cracking eggs to make them stand upright, and is also the hero of other American stories. All these things are solid and substantial realities; but the Alhambra itself is the airy fabric of a vision, an artist’s fantasy, a poet’s dream, a——

I am checked in my rhapsody by the remembrance of what I heard as I wandered through these halls of heavenly beauty, and floated back along the centuries until I was a Moor myself, and formed one of the proud Sultan’s glittering train, and lived in the Alhambra in all its pristine glory of Moorish arch and marble pillar, its masonry of transparent lace-work, its softened hues of red and blue lit up with glowing gold, its glistening Oriental tiles, its pomp, its splendour, its majesty and might. And while I dreamed, and stood aside in the beautiful Court of Lions to let the veiled beauties of the harem pass with their escort of negro guards, a voice broke in upon my dreams, and brought me with an earthquake shock back from the dead centuries to the pulsing, breathing ‘time by the clock'—and this is what the voice said: ‘H’m! it is rather like the place in Leicester Square, isn’t it?’

With a cry of horror I looked up and beheld an ulster and a billycock and a red guide-book. And presently one of the officials of the Alhambra approached the ulster and the billycock, and showed it a book of photographs of other ulsters and billycocks, taken on the spot, leaning against the pillars of the Alhambra. Would the gentleman and his friend like to be taken in the Alhambra? They would—and they were. I fled from the scene of desecration. Ulsters and billycocks, with their hands in their pockets, leaning against the marble pillars of the Alhambra! O Moors, that wrought this fairy fabric, beautiful for ever, and to be hallowed until all taste is dead, and barbarians—not from Barbary, but from Europe—have made the world a rubbish-heap of the vulgar, the gross, and the commonplace, if your disembodied spirits ever visit your lost kingdom in the pale glimpses of the moon, what must you think of these billycocks and ulsters, and of the people who wear them, and loll in mustard-coloured tourists’ suits against your dainty walls, and are taken like that and duly exhibited to other billycocks and ulsters in a soot-begrimed hole called London, that I don’t suppose any Moor ever heard of, and pointed to with pride as ‘Me and Jack taken in the Alhambra—don’t you know!’

I saw everything in Granada as quickly as I could, for the town is cold and the people are uncouth, and have a habit of looking upon the foreigner as their legitimate prey. Extortion, robbery, cheating, and imposition are rampant. To get about at all one must strew the ground with pesetas. Difficulties are made specially by the guides, in order that the silver key may be produced as often as possible. Being in a hurry to get away, I took a little man and bade him take me everywhere at once. But I told him if he took me to see a Murillo I would put my navaja into him. (I have seen 7,482 Murillos, all genuine, in Spain, and I am getting a little tired of them.) My little man took me everywhere; but every five minutes he turned round and exclaimed, ‘Aqui es costumbre dar una propina,’ which meant, ‘Here it is customary to give a tip.’ That wretched little man made me give pesetas to gardeners, servants, coachmen, doorkeepers, officials, watchmen, porters, and every person, male and female, who happened to be in the places or grounds I visited. And I know as well as possible that he afterwards returned and went ‘whacks’ with the lot. I protested once or twice, and tried to make him ashamed of himself, but he swore by all the saints that it was ‘costumbre.’ He admitted that it was an imposition, but he insisted that the people were paid no wages, and so had to live on what visitors gave them. When I had finished with him, however, I read him a long moral lecture, and gave him to understand that he must not take all the people who were not born in Granada for idiots. I’m afraid my protests were in vain. The motto of Granada will still remain, ‘Aqui es costumbre to fleece the foreigner.’

That which filled me with the greatest astonishment in Granada, after the Alhambra, was the way in which all the dogs of the town attended mass in the cathedral. Quite half the ladies who came in and knelt down brought dogs with them. The dogs didn’t sit still, but went on excursions into the different chapels, and visited the altars, and certainly, when there, their actions could not be interpreted as showing reverence or respect. I stood petrified to the spot when I saw a big retriever who came in with an old lady deliberately ascend the steps of the high altar, and sniff at the calves of the officiating priests. Nobody took any notice, except a little acolyte, who pulled the dog’s tail and then patted his head. Several cats being also in the sacred edifice, there were times when some of the dogs left off sniffing around and joined in a merry scamper after a startled tom, who fled and leapt for refuge on to some upper portion of an altar, and looked down and spat at his enemies. I have been in a good many cathedrals, but I never saw dogs enjoy so much liberty in one before. The people of Granada are exceptionally devout, which made me wonder all the more at the custom. But to admit dogs is the custom, and, being the custom, I suppose nobody thinks anything of it.

After the Alhambra, the great Mosque of Cordova is the most beautiful thing in Spain. Built by the Moors in 796, it still stands a monument of their glorious architecture. Charles V., in 1526, allowed a portion of it to be destroyed to make room for an ugly cathedral in the centre of it. When he saw the act of vandalism that the priests had persuaded him to permit he was deeply grieved, and exclaimed, ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world!’ You can imagine how beautiful it must be for the man who knocked down half the Alhambra to build himself a hideously ugly drab-stone palace to be grieved at its partial destruction. This mosque is the finest type in Europe of a temple of Islam. It is a forest of beautiful marble pillars, supporting the most exquisite Moorish arches. I spent a whole day in the mosque with an intelligent little Italian, who knew every nook and corner of it.

When you get to Cordova you are never sure that you will see the mosque. You may not find it. Cordova is built on the principle of the maze at Hampton Court, but there is no nice kind gentleman on a raised platform to extricate you from the labyrinth of lanes. Even the inhabitants occasionally get lost, and wander up this street and down that for hours until they accidentally get to their homes again. Many of the dogs in Cordova have their owners’ names and addresses on their collars. This is a great help to the inhabitants. When a Cordovan gets lost he waits about and looks on all the dogs’ collars who run past him. When he sees a dog who has his (the lost inhabitant’s) street on its collar, he follows him, and is so guided home.

These things are not romances, but facts. Every street is exactly alike, and every street is crossed and recrossed by dozens of other streets, and they all wind in and out, and they are all about three feet wide—some of them are not two feet wide. Woe betide the stranger who ventures out alone, and does not know enough Spanish to ask to be guided home again! He may spend a week easily in trying to find his way back to the hotel.

The hotel in Cordova is one of the best in Spain, and is always crammed with foreigners. The best time to study the guests is at table d’hôte. I have always my ears and eyes open then. I am much amused by a young Frenchman who has been to London, and is entertaining the other French guests with an account of the marvels he has seen there. The English live entirely on mutton-chops and beefsteaks, and always have sauce out of bottles. They even put this sauce, which is black, over their pudding and into their tea. On Sundays the English have no dinner. They only have tea and cold meat. The French ladies hold up their hands and cry out that never will they venture into such a horrible country. The Frenchman then sends them into fits by describing the feet and boots of English young ladies. Their feet are enormous, and they wear big cloth boots with no heels to them. Many girls of only sixteen already have the gout. Englishmen drink beer out of pewter pots in the highest society. The Prince of Wales, even at his grand dinners at Marlborough House, always has beer in a pewter pot by his side.

Near the Frenchman who has been to London and gathered so much information sit an extraordinary family, who are the wonder of the hotel. There is an old gentleman who speaks nothing but English, and is married to a widow who speaks nothing but French, with two daughters by a former husband who speak nothing but German. It is the oddest family arrangement that I ever came across in my life.

Then there is a Russian gentleman who is three feet high and four feet across. His head is a big dumpling with two eyes and something that with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass you make out to be a nose. By way of compensation he has a mouth that goes right across his face and turns round each corner. His body is a larger dumpling, and for legs he has two boiled jam rolls.

We sit down 150 at table d’hôte, and 149 people leave off eating and sit in blank amazement when this little Russian commences operations upon an orange. With a series of snorts and a couple of wriggles he gets the peel off. He then puts the orange between his teeth and forces it into his mouth by hitting it hard with both his fists. During this operation the people opposite and on either side are continually ducking their heads to avoid squirts of orange-juice in the eye.

As soon as the little Russian succeeds in closing his mouth he goes black in the face, and remains so for about two minutes. At the end of this time there is a loud gurgle; then the great mouth slowly opens, and calmly and passively the owner allows the pulp from which the juice has been extracted to fall upon his plate in portions. Horrible as this description may sound, it falls far short of the actual truth.

The commencement of the last act of the Russian gentleman’s orange tragedy is the signal for everybody to jump up from the table and rush from the room.

There is another gentleman at table d’hôte—a Spaniard—who wouldn’t be a bad fellow if, after he had eaten a couple of olives between each course, he would put the stones anywhere except on the tablecloth. This gentleman is short-sighted, and has a pair of eye-glasses two sizes too large for the bridge of his nose. They drop into his soup, they come off into his wine, and they sometimes fall into the gravy of the dish the waiter is handing round. While the gentleman is fishing out his eye-glasses he drops his napkin. When the waiter picks up the napkin and presents it to him he drops his fork. By the time his fork has been restored to him his eye-glasses are in the dish again.

As the process is repeated with every course that comes to him, the gentlemen and ladies below him have several long waits during table d’hôte.

Many people will remember the case of the English doctor who shot a gipsy at Cordova. The gipsy was a well-known guide, who used to take foreigners to see the great mosque, from the tower of which an excellent view of Cordova can be obtained. Several tourists who had ascended the tower with him on previous occasions had either been seized with giddiness and fallen off, or committed suicide by throwing themselves over the parapet. The suicide theory was the one most generally adopted in the case of Englishmen, because the Spaniards still believe that all Englishmen suffer from a malady called El Spleen, and that El Spleen compels the sufferer to end his days and his sufferings in a violent manner. There are no coroners’ inquests in Spain, and so no one ever troubled much to inquire into the deaths, which, as far as public opinion was concerned, were easily accounted for by El Spleen.

It was while turning to descend from the tower that Dr. Middleton found himself suddenly grasped round the throat by the gipsy guide, Heredia, and in such a manner that nothing but a shot from a pistol, which luckily enough he carried in a back pocket, could free him from his assailant. The doctor was acquitted, and the verdict was received with applause by a crowded court. There can be no doubt of the impartiality of Spanish judges, and of the friendly feeling which exists among Spaniards for Englishmen. That this feeling should have been expressed in loud applause in an open court in Cordova is all the more remarkable when we bear in mind that the gipsies who swarm in the city were actually thirsting for the blood of the Englishman who had taken the life of one of their race, and were threatening revenge on all those who ventured to express sympathy for Dr. Middleton. The gipsies of the south of Spain have always been a power in the country, and there are instances on record which prove that the Government has on more than one occasion been compelled to conciliate them by granting them small privileges. In the days following the revolution which led to the flight of Queen Isabella the gipsies became for a time a terror to all law-abiding and inoffensive citizens, and it was only by executing summary justice upon gipsy culprits that their power was broken.

The gipsies both of Cordova and Granada still, however, maintain the privilege of acting as guides to those who are foolish enough to take them. Outside the Hotel Suizo in Cordova there are always dozens of them hanging about. The reason of this is that it is utterly impossible for a stranger to find his way about Cordova alone. The narrow streets cross and recross each other in a perfect maze, and they are all exactly alike, so that there is no landmark for the pedestrian to steer by, and, as the streets are too narrow to admit carriages, a guide is a sheer necessity.

CHAPTER VII.

COSAS DE ESPAÑA.

Pasajes, the quaintest place in the world, is within easy reach of San Sebastian. It is a land-locked harbour, and looks for all the world like a lake surrounded on all sides by hills, until you come upon a gully between high, overhanging cliffs, when, after a few minutes’ sail, you catch a glimpse of the open sea. One of the rocks is surmounted by a castle tower, and is called Castillo de Santa Isabel. Pasajes is a thriving town, and it is from this port that the Basques and Spanish emigrants sail for South America; but it is doubtful whether it has not missed its vocation. With a harbour the existence of which cannot be guessed from the sea, it is an ideal pirate’s nest.

After a Spanish tour is over, the traveller divides Spain into two portions—the portion that was conquered by the Moor, and the portion that was not. Of the first portion he brings away a wondrous remembrance of glorious architecture and graceful decoration; of the second portion, the things which linger longest in his memory are the dances and the bull-fights.

To me the worst part of a bull-fight was the barbarous cruelty to the horses. They had no chance. They were simply brought into the arena to be gored, and, when they fell, they were beaten most brutally with sticks to get them to rise again. When they staggered to their feet, and tottered in the death agony, the Spaniards shouted with laughter. Even when the poor beasts lay in the last quiver of death, they were barbarously ill-used by the assistants, who tore the harness from them to put it on other victims. A more dastardly exhibition of brutality I never witnessed in my life. One feels sorry for the bull; but at least he has some sport. His treatment is cruel enough in all conscience; but he has four or five years of luxurious living in order to prepare him for his death. The poor horses only come to the arena to be tortured after wearing out their lives in the service of their master. Many of them are poor half-starved cab horses, and can hardly totter when they are spurred and beaten into the ring. If you say to a Spaniard that it is cruel to beat a horse like this, he stares at you and says, ‘Ah, but he is not a good horse, no vale na; he is worth nothing.’ There are some points in a bull-fight which command admiration for skill and dexterity. The espadas (the real heroes of the proceedings, the leading actors and stars) perform brilliant feats alone with the bull, and often incur great risks. But these would be far more worthy of admiration if they were performed before the bull had been tired out by baiting and weakened by loss of blood, instead of after. But it is useless protesting to a Spaniard. Bull-fights are their national pastime—the love of them is born with them, and you might as well try to mop up the sea as to put them down or abate their cruelty.

The horses and the horsemanship in Madrid are unequalled in any other town of Europe. The men ride as if they were born in the saddle. They ride horses that would cause every head to turn in Rotten Row over the stone-paved streets and in and out of the heaviest traffic. The Andalusian horse is a beautiful creature, and here is groomed to perfection. Everybody in Madrid keeps a horse and a carriage. Everything is sacrificed for show and outward appearance. There are families who go without meat for dinner that they may turn out in the drive in good style.

In Madrid I learnt the national cure for a cold on the chest. You squeeze the juice of an orange into a cup; you put in a heap of sugar, and you fill up with a hot decoction of marshmallow, which they call Flor de Malva. Then you go to bed and perspire. The next morning your chest is easy. I tried the remedy and found it efficacious. The drink is soothing and comforting. Try it. You need not wait till you have a cold.

Bad money is very common in all parts of Spain. Sometimes the coins have merely undergone the process of ‘sweating,’ more often than not they are altogether spurious.

Some years ago the newspapers announced that, on a certain day, new five-peseta pieces, bearing as impress the head of the little King, would be issued. No one had yet seen a coin with the effigy of the Rey chico, and so the issue of the new coins was awaited with eagerness. A gang of coiners immediately set to work, and early on the morning of the day announced they set forth to circulate them. One of them would enter a tramcar or omnibus and offer the conductor, when the latter came for his fare, one of the ‘new coins.’ The conductor naturally remarked upon it as the first he had seen, and examined it with interest. The curiosity of the passengers was roused; everybody was eager to see the new coins and the first portrait of the little King; and so when the owner of it explained that he had just come from the Bank, where he had received a number of them, and said that he was willing to exchange a few of the new pieces for old ones, his offer was gratefully accepted. Thus it happened that before a single genuine coin had left the Mint, Madrid was in possession of an immense number of false ones.

In a previous chapter I referred to the Spanish theatre, and I mentioned the peculiarities of the modern drama as it is understood in Spain. The favourite dramatist of the day, the Most Excellent Señor Don José Echegaray, had just produced a new drama at the Teatro Español, in Madrid, which only took him thirty days to write, according to rumour. The title of the drama is ‘La Realidad y el Delirio’ (Reality and Delirium), and there is a good deal of both in the production. The plot is a fair specimen of Echegaray’s method and the kind of drama which the Spaniards accept as an evening’s entertainment, and so it may interest the reader to hear all about it, more especially as since the Ibsen boom set in our English critics have taken Echegaray under their wing.

Gonzalo and Angela are newly married, and, like most newly-married folks, they love each other. Enrico is Gonzalo’s friend; he is also a bad young man who has conceived an unholy passion for his friend’s wife. One day he tells Angela that Gonzalo, who has just left home, pretending that he was to make a long journey on business, is really about to pay a visit to a young lady who lives in a certain house in a street close by. Angela is much upset by the communication, and becomes a prey to various conflicting emotions. Enrico, at last, while she is in a state of great excitement, induces her to accompany him to a lonely house, from the windows of which she sees Gonzalo entering the house of Julia, the young lady previously referred to. Angela faints and falls into Enrico’s arms.

When she recovers from her swoon she despises herself in strong language and goes home. Gonzalo returns. He tells his wife all she knows already, but explains that he went to see Miss Julia in order to break off all relations with her. This noble confession fills Angela with remorse, and she bitterly repents her jealousy and wickedness. She spreads herself out in forcible and poetic language, and at considerable length, over the height of her husband’s love and the depth of her own impropriety.

Enrico has promised Angela never to see her again, and, desiring to keep his word, he calls upon Gonzalo to bid him good-bye, previous to setting out on a long sea voyage. Gonzalo, who loves his friend, refuses to hear of such a scheme, and proposes instead that they should all go to Paris together. Enrico hesitates and is lost. He consents to go to Paris.

On the way to ‘la Ville Lumière’ an accident on the line causes Gonzalo to alight from the reserved compartment in which they are all travelling together. Gonzalo smokes a cigarette and strolls on the line and inspects the country; but he goes a little too far, and sees the train starting on its journey again without him. He runs after and catches it up (an easy matter in Spain, where five miles an hour is the express speed), but in the hurry he jumps into the wrong compartment, which is not the ‘reservado,’ but the one next to it. The night is dark, and the light from the illuminated ‘reservado’ throws a shadowy picture on the walls of a black cutting through which the train is speeding. Gonzalo, looking out of the window, sees the ‘shadow on the wall.’ He recognises the silhouettes of his wife and his friend. Suddenly he sees the shadows approach each other. One shadow puts its arm round the other shadow’s neck and kisses it. Presently both shadows’ arms are flung around both shadows’ necks. Gonzalo waits to see no more. Hideous thoughts flash across his frenzied brain. He opens the door of the compartment, gets out upon the footboard, and is making his way along it to the ‘reservado’ to demand an explanation of the occupants, when his foot slips and he falls heavily upon the line.

Gonzalo escapes death, but he loses his reason. He is picked up and attended to, and in time he recovers from his wounds, only to be haunted by the memory of what he saw that fatal night. He raves wildly, madly. He does not know whether what he saw was real or a hideous nightmare: whether it was reality or delirium. In this scene the actor takes the middle of the stage and gives off some of the finest dramatic soliloquies that Señor Echegaray has ever written.

There is one person beside the guilty parties who knows the truth. This is the father of Gonzalo. He puts matters to rights by having a duel with Enrico and killing him. Enrico, repenting his villainy, makes but a poor defence of his life. The father of Gonzalo then forgives Angela, and Gonzalo recovers his senses and embraces his wife, and the curtain falls with Angela standing between father and son and representing, according to the author, ‘the innocent victim of a villain’s lawless love, purified by the suffering she has endured and the sorrow she has known.’

CHAPTER VIII.

OFF TO AFRICA.

‘Africa’ has not a very taking sound about it. When I told my friends and acquaintances that I was going to Africa, they had visions of lions and snakes, and jungles and swamps, and they insisted on my taking with me an armoury of guns and rifles, and a pharmacy of drugs and antidotes. I am going, however, to keep as much out of the track of the lions as possible; at least, I shall avoid the lions that have to be attacked with firearms, but the lions that you attack with a visiting-card I certainly hope I shall encounter. I have a beautiful letter of introduction to the reigning sovereign of Morocco, which I hope to present to him in his imperial palace (Dar Dabiba) when I go to Fez-al-jadeed and Fez-al-baleed, and I am assured that he will give me a royal reception, and trot out his dancing dervishes and his snake charmers for my edification. I have also a letter of introduction to a great Moorish General, a direct descendant of Othello, who will provide me with an escort of soldiers when I go to Wazan, which is a long way up country, and where I am bound to go, as I have a little business with the Grand Shereef, who resides there. I shall be obliged to have an escort, because the people of that district are so fanatical that there is no knowing what they might do to me. Mogador, Tetuan, and Tangiers are also on my visiting list, so that you may expect a great deal of Oriental imagery and barbaric splendour in these pages. In Algeria I shall sojourn awhile also, and I may pay a flying visit to Carthage, where I am desirous of making a few inquiries with regard to the career of a young lady named Salammbo. This is my programme as it is at present shaped in my mind’s eye, Horatio. Whether I shall be enabled to carry it out, of course, depends on circumstances; but I shall get over a good deal of the ground mentioned, and I have no doubt I shall see some very wonderful things, and meet with many exciting adventures.

At present the Fates have brought me no further than Marseilles; but even the short distance from the capital of France to the Mediterranean seaport was not accomplished without a struggle. We were unable in Paris to secure seats in the ‘train of luxury’ one January night, but I was told there was another train at 7.15 which would do the journey to Marseilles in fifteen hours twenty-seven minutes by the time-table. The platform was crowded with dukes and duchesses with their footmen, and ladies’ maids and lap-dogs, who, like myself, had not been able to get seats in the ‘train de luxe,’ and who were going by the 7.15, which was a first-class express with sleeping-cars, and all that we should miss would be the restaurant and the smoking-saloon. I brightened up at this information, and we called several porters to take our luggage and secure us a berth in the sleeping-car. The porters looked at us as though we had asked for a bit of the sun to put in our pockets to keep our hands warm. ‘A berth in the sleeping-car, monsieur!’ exclaimed the first porter who recovered his breath. ‘Ha, ha! monsieur is joking; why, they are all booked a week in advance to Marseilles at this season of the year.’ ‘Well, then,’ I said savagely, ‘at least find us two corner seats in a smoking-carriage.’ ‘I will try, monsieur,’ replied the porter, and away he sped. In a few minutes he returned, shrugged his shoulders apologetically, and delivered himself of the following elegant sentence: ‘It touches me to the heart, and causes me profound sorrow, to have to inform monsieur that every corner seat is taken.’

It was true. I had heard a good deal about the fight for seats in the Marseilles express, but I realized it for the first time then. We were dragged up the train and down the train; we got on this step and on that, and peered into compartment after compartment. It was the same tale everywhere. Every coach was jammed as full as a cattle truck. At last there was a crowd of about fifty passengers for Marseilles all clamouring for seats, and there was not a single vacant place. Then the Chef de Gare most condescendingly informed me that he would put on another carriage. We felt deeply grateful. Having paid £4 4s. for a seat, we felt that the company was placing us under a life-long obligation by giving us one for our money. So we bowed to the ground to the station-master, and begged him to accept the assurance of our most distinguished consideration. He accepted it. Then we offered handfuls of francs to the railway porters, and these were also accepted. In return for our largesse, we told them we required them, when the extra carriage was joined on, to hold the crowd back until we had jumped in and secured the corners. When that extra carriage came, it was Waterloo all over again. But the arms of England (mine and Albert Edward’s) were finally victorious, and we beat back four Frenchmen, a Russian, a German, two Poles, a couple of Arabs, and a Greek, and captured two corners. Directly we were seated the crowd poured in upon us, and at 7.15 we steamed out of the station—eight in the compartment, and about fourteen portmanteaux, nine hat-boxes, eight bundles of rugs, and ten parcels piled up to the ceiling on the top of us. It was an hour before we had sorted ourselves, and got the hand luggage packed away in the nets above and under the seats. By this time we were stifling. Both the windows were shut, the foot-warmers were burning hot, and the place was the Black Hole of Calcutta multiplied by eight. Albert Edward requested the permission of our fellow travellers to have the window a little way down, as we were nearly asphyxiated. Albert Edward asked the French passengers in French, the Germans in German, the Arabs in Arabic, and the Russians in Russian; and they all admired his linguistic attainments, but absolutely declined to allow the windows to be opened one inch, or for one second. They inquired in their various languages if he desired their immediate death. He replied that he did not; but that was the catastrophe he wished to avoid for me. I joined in gently but firmly, and brilliantly distinguished myself in all the languages except the Russian. But the enemy remained immovable.

Suddenly Albert Edward had an idea. His German-Arab features relaxed into an expression of sardonic glee. When everybody was dropping off to sleep he put it into execution. He struck a whole box of Vesuvians, one after the other. There was a simultaneous sneeze, six sleepers leapt to their feet coughing and gesticulating and swearing, and in an instant both windows were pulled down with a bang, and the fresh, pure air of heaven rushed into the black hole.

Over the agonies of that long night of intermittent suffocation I draw a partial veil. Now and again by some violent expedient, such as fancying we heard an accident, or pretending that we had run over a man, or that Mount Vesuvius in a state of eruption was distinctly visible on our left, we succeeded in getting a window down for a minute or two; but from 7.15 p.m. until 10.42 a.m. we were mercilessly smashed and stifled in a compartment which was not a first-class carriage, but a tin of compressed humanity.

At a little after eight o’clock in the morning we reached Avignon, and here we had five minutes for refreshment. I should like to have been an artist, to have made a sketch of the station as it appeared when the passengers alighted and dashed wildly at a little table set out with basins of hot coffee and rolls of bread a yard long. The ladies looked lovely, as they always do, but the circumstances were trying. Complexions are not at their best, nor is the coiffure at its apogee of excellence, when you have been sitting all night long in your clothes in a hermetically sealed railway-carriage. And the dirt and grime of travel will stain the most delicate cheek, and the flying grit of the engine will lodge occasionally on the most aristocratic nose, and get into the most lustrous and beautiful eyes. I say it without disrespect, but we were a seedy, pallid, untidy and unkempt lot that turned out on the platform of Avignon in the morning sunlight, and scalded our throats with coffee out of pudding-basins, and fought our way through the crowd at the buffet with the three feet rolls that were at once weapons of attack and defence. I was much interested in the duchesses en deshabille, also in the footmen in chimney-pot hats, and in the ladies’ maids with smashed bonnets, who flew up and down the platform, vainly trying to arrange their mistresses’ hair, and put them a little to rights, with a bowl of hot coffee in one hand, and a roll in the other. One clever maid put her coffee on the platform, and held her roll between her teeth, while with her two hands she dexterously arranged her lady’s back hair in an ornamental and chaste design, and stabbed it with hairpins at the rate of ten a second.

But the most charming feature of that five minutes’ wait was to me the way in which the dukes and earls and millionaires from the coupés and the sleeping-cars were deprived of their coffee and roll by their obedience to the will of their wives. A duchess said to her husband: ‘John, I think Fido wants a walk.’ And with her own fair hands she dragged a big black poodle from under the seat, and gave him to the duke. The duke accepted Fido without a murmur, and led him up and down the platform by his chain for the whole five minutes. Another lady handed her husband a little black-and-tan terrier to be exercised in a similar manner. Before the bell rang I counted seven husbands all walking their wives’ pet dogs up and down the platform, and some even went outside the station with the dogs in order that the little dears might not fancy themselves debarred by surrounding circumstances from any of the privileges of the usual morning run at home.

All things come to an end in this world, and so did our journey to Marseilles, which I have related to show that the troubles of African explorers often begin much nearer home; but it is a wonder we didn’t come to an end first. When, however, at noon I lounged on the harbour quays, amid such a wild, dark, picturesque crowd as few other European towns could produce, I was amply compensated for all my trials on the road. I never saw such a collection of flashing eyes and coal-black hair and sunburnt faces in my life. There were Italians and Spaniards and Greeks, and all the fierce and dusky sons of the Levant; there were Turks and Arabs and Egyptians and Syrians and African blacks, and the natives added to the picturesqueness of the crowd with their swarthy faces, fierce eyes, and splendid hair; and I stood with the motley crowd and lolled with my back against the wall, sunning myself as they did, and feeling beautifully Bohemian and lamentably lazy. It was such a treat, after the harsh travelling of the North, to find one’s self wooed by the warm breeze and kissed by the burning sun, that I couldn’t have taken my hands out of my pockets and left off lolling against that south wall if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other of my most intimate friends, had come by. For a whole two hours did I and Albert Edward loll about and frizzle and shut one eye, like dogs going to sleep, but I kept my other eye open wide enough to take a few observations, and make a note of them.

The Eastern custom of standing in a circle largely prevailed with the crowd of idlers. Here was a group of Greeks in full costume in a circle; there a group of Italians in a circle. The Marseilles sailors and labourers, and the Marseilles old ladies and the Marseilles young ladies, ‘circled’ also; they all stood and screamed at each other, and shouted at the top of their voices (this is conversation in Marseilles), but no one ever broke the circle.

The groups and the crowds of swarthy sons and daughters of the South were not exactly the sort of groups and crowds one would like to be alone in, with the Bank of England in one’s pockets. I should say one might have manned a dozen pirate ships at any one quay in five minutes. Knives were worn handy, and there was a flash of steel more than once when argument became high. But for all that the men and women themselves wore a good deal of common jewellery; watch-chains by the score I counted across the woollen waistcoats of the sailors, and most of the men had heavy earrings in their ears. The scarlet sashes worn round the waists, the blue and green plush trousers, and the bright orange and red handkerchiefs twisted over the heads of some of the women, turban fashion, imparted to portions of the crowd an operatic look, and I expected every minute to hear them commence a chorus.