Awaiting Us At The Rear Of The Station Were Three Enormous Lumbering
Diligences, Each Furnished With Nine Superb Mules, - Four Pairs And A
Leader.
They were loaded with gaudy trappings, and their shiny coats,
and backs shorn into graceful arabesques, showed that they did not
belong to the working-classes, but enjoyed the gentlemanly leisure of
official station.
The drivers wore a smart postilion uniform and the
royal crown on their caps.
We threw some handfuls of copper and bronze among the picturesque
mendicants. They gathered them up with grave Castilian decorum, and
said, "God will repay your graces." The postilions cracked their whips,
the mules shook their bells gayly, the heavy wagons started off at a
full gallop, and the beggars said, "May your graces go with God!"
It was the end of July, and the sky was blue and cloudless. The fine,
soft light of the afternoon was falling on the tawny slopes and the
close-reaped fields. The harvest was over. In the fields on either side
they were threshing their grain, not as in the outside world, with the
whirring of loud and swift machinery, nor even with the active and
lively swinging of flails; but in the open air, under the warm sky, the
cattle were lazily treading out the corn on the bare ground, to be
winnowed by the wandering wind. No change from the time of Solomon.
Through an infinity of ages, ever since corn and cattle were, the
Iberian farmer in this very spot had driven his beasts over his crop,
and never dreamed of a better way of doing the work.
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