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Spanish Vistas

Chapter 24: FOOTNOTES:
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About This Book

A collection of travel sketches and descriptive essays that trace journeys through diverse Spanish regions — from northern towns and historic centers to Cordova, the Alhambra, and Mediterranean ports. The author pairs vivid landscape and architectural description with lively portrayals of markets, religious observances, street characters, and everyday customs, often recorded from on-the-spot sketches. Observations contrast regional temperaments and cultural influences, note political and social attitudes, and reflect on the impact of travel and modernization. The book concludes with practical hints for travellers and numerous illustrations meant to preserve contemporary scenes.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The dancing boys still officiate at Seville, also, in Holy-week, where they leap merrily before the high altar, and do not even take off their hats to the Host. The story runs that, years ago, a visiting bishop from Rome found fault with this as being unorthodox, and threatened to put a stop to it. He complained to the Pope, and a lenient order issued from the Vatican that the observance should be discontinued when the boys' clothes should be worn out. Up to the present day, curiously enough, the clothes have not been worn out.

[2] These last are called tocas, and are rapidly superseding the long mantilla.

[3] This characterization, our own experience led us to conclude, was exceedingly unjust.

[4] Some time before this he had, by too adventurous play, received a tossing which laid him up for eight months, and his death in the ring has since been reported.

[5] In this connection it is curious to observe that the Toledan peasants, like the Chinese, confound the letters r and l—as when they say flol for flor, "flower."

[6] Contained in the series called "The Man with Five Wives."

[7] A nickname alluding to the sooty black of the clerical costume.

[8] Literally, "sun-trap."

[9] Irving's name heads the ponderous register in which visitors, embracing some of the most distinguished of the earth, have recorded themselves for fifty years past; and though it is not generally known, his signature may also be found pencilled on the inner wall of the little mosque near the Comares Tower, just under the interpolated Spanish choir gallery. Yet there seems to be a degree of mistiness in the Granadian mind respecting the author of "Tales of the Alhambra." I think the people sometimes confounded him with the Father of his Country. At all events, the Hotel Washington Irving is labelled, at one of its entrances, "Hotel Washington," as if that were the same thing.

[10] "Fleming," a name commonly applied to Spanish gypsies; whence it has been inferred that the first of them came from the Netherlands.