Our Own Speed Was Such That We Could Not Help Striking The Trolley In A Collision Which Was The Fault Of No One Apparently.

The front of the car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our conversation was interrupted.

Immediately a crowd assembled from the earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to _constater_ the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the taciturnity of the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and was much decenter than any sort of utterance. On our way home we had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a more inoffensive way of doing it.

By the sort of echo notable in life's experience we had a reverberation of the orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at the time we believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I still doubt whether anywhere in America the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich, sad calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that you do not get this plaintive music without the accompanying note of the hucksters' donkeys, which, if they were better advised, would not close with the sort of inefficient sifflication which they now use in spoiling an otherwise most noble, most leonine roar. But when were donkeys of any sort ever well advised in all respects? Those of Seville, where donkeys abound, were otherwise of the superior intelligence which throughout Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far behind, and constitutes the donkeys, far beyond the idle and useless dogs, the friends of man. They indefinitely outnumber the dogs, and the cats are of course nowhere in the count.

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