This Indeed
Will Not Hold Quite True Of That Thoroughfare, Twenty Feet Wide At
Least, Which Led From Our Hotel To The Paseo Del Gran Capitan.
In this
were divers shops of the genteeler sort, and some large cafes, standing
full of men of leisure,
Who crowded to their doors and windows, with
their hats on and their hands in their pockets, as at a club, and let no
fact of the passing world escape their hungry eyes. Their behavior
expressed a famine of incident in Cordova which was pathetic.
VII
The people did not look very healthy as to build or color, and there was
a sound of coughing everywhere. To be sure, it was now the season of the
first colds, which would no doubt wear off with the coming of next
spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much begging as at
Toledo, because there could not be anywhere. I am sorry I can contribute
no statistics as to the moral or intellectual condition of Cordova;
perhaps they will not be expected or desired of me; I can only say that
the general intelligence is such that no one will own he does not know
anything you ask him even when he does not; but this is a national
rather than a local trait, which causes the stranger to go in many wrong
directions all over the peninsula. I should not say that there was any
noticeable decay of character from the north to the south such as the
attributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan Knowlesian drama
would teach; the Cordovese looked no more shiftless than the haughtiest
citizens of Burgos.
They had decidedly prettier _patios_ and more of them, and they had many
public carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital. Rubber
tires I did not expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a city
where a single course over the pavements of 850 would have worn them to
tatters: but there seems a good deal of public spirit if one may judge
from the fact that it is the municipality which keeps Abderrahman's
mosque in repair. There are public gardens, far pleasanter than those of
Valladolid, which we visited in an interval of the afternoon, and there
is a very personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope of
seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. But there had been no
feast of bulls; and we had to make what we could out of the walking and
driving in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long,
discouraging course there were some good houses, but not many, and the
promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in
private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public ones
as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in the
horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their
hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray.
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