The smell drove us out, and we
watched a public-spirited peasant beating the acorns from a live-oak
near the station with a long pole. He brought a great many down, and
first filled his sash-pocket with them; then he distributed them among
the children of the third-class passengers who left the train and
flocked about him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the acorns,
though they were more than an inch long, narrow, and very sharp-pointed.
As soon as he had discharged his self-assumed duty the peasant lay down
on the sloping bank under the tree, and with his face in the grass, went
to sleep for all our stay, and for what I know the whole night after.
It did not now seem likely that we should ever reach Gordova, though
people made repeated expeditions to the front of the train, and came
back reporting that in an hour we should start. We interested ourselves
as intensely as possible in a family from the next compartment,
London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or English as they fancied,
who we somehow understood lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our
interest. Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the interest
taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or
fourteen who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our
train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he seemed
to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the train. She owned
that the deserter was her father, and while we were still poignantly
concerned for her he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl
herself had apparently not shared even under pressure of the whole
compartment's sympathy.
IV
The day waned more and more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank
with that sudden drop which the sun has at last. The sky flushed
crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over the
summits billowing softly westward. There had been a good deal of
joking, both Spanish and English, among the passengers; I had found
particularly cheering the richness of a certain machinist's trousers of
bright golden corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the
scene our spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where
the sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against
the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled against the
darkening sky.
Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection that this was the
region where the natives had been so wicked in times past that an
ingenious statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined
bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and reform
them.
