Our Policeman Confessed That There Was Nothing
More Worth Seeing In Tarifa, And We Entreated Of Him The Favor Of
Showing us a shop where we could buy a Cordovese hat; a hat which we had
seen nourishing on the
Heads of all men in Cordova and Seville and
Granada and Ronda, and had always forborne to buy because we could get
it anywhere; and now we were almost leaving Spain without it. We wanted
one brown in color, as well as stiff and flat of brim, and slightly
conical in form; and our policeman promptly imagined it, and took us to
a shop abounding solely in hats, and especially in Cordoveses. The
proprietor came out wiping his mouth from an inner room, where he had
left his family visibly at their _almuerzo;_ and then we were desolated
together that he should only have Cordoveses that were black. But
passing a _patio_ where there was a poinsettia in brilliant bloom
against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety store where there were
Cordoveses of all colors; and we chose one of the right brown, with the
picture of a beautiful Spanish girl, wearing a pink shawl, inside the
crown which was fluted round in green and red ribbon. Seven pesetas was
the monstrous asking price, but we beat it down to five and a half, and
then came a trying moment: we could not carry a Cordovese in
tissue-paper through the streets of Tarifa, but could we ask our guide,
who was also our armed escort, to carry it? He simplified the situation
by taking it himself and bearing it back to the _fonda_ as proudly as if
he had not also worn a sword at his side; and we parted there in a
kindness which I should like to think he shared equally with us.
He was practically the last of those Spaniards who were always winning
my heart (save in the bank at Valladolid where they must have
misunderstood me), and whom I remember with tenderness for their
courtesy and amiability. In little things and large, I found the
Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese commercial traveler say
of them in Venice fifty years ago: "They are the honestest people in
Europe." In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which
English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader
asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the
Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty,
treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of
bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they
should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do
not know how the Americans are reputed good and just and law-abiding,
although they often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion rather
often burn negroes alive.
THE END
End of Familiar Spanish Travels, by W. D. Howells
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