There Were No Top-Hats Or Other Formality In The Men's Dress; Some Of Them Were On Horseback, And There Were Two Women Riding.

Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys on Jhe bridle-path next the tram.

I confess that they interested me more than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what passed in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.

X

SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

It is always a question how much or little we had better know about the history of a strange country when seeing it. If the great mass of travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in favor of knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not say they would be altogether unwise. History itself is often of two minds about the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the misfits. What did it avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.

I

Before I left Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this _Seville in the Hand,_ as it calls itself, but I got it too late for use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in, and holds with historians who accept the Phosnicians as the sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of commission those Biblical "ships of Tarshish" which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and from the neighboring coasts.

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