Yet I Would Not Misprize The Cats Of Seville, Which
Apparently Have Their Money Price.
We stopped to admire a beautiful
white one, on our way to see the market one day, praising it as
intelligibly as we could, and the owner caught it up, when we had passed
and ran after us, and offered to sell it to us.
That might have been because it was near the market where we experienced
almost the only mercantile zeal we had known in Spain. Women with ropes
and garlands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, and we had
hopeful advances from the stalls of salads and fruits, where there was a
brave and beautiful show of lettuces and endives, grapes, medlars, and
heaps of melons, but no oranges; I do not know why, though there were
shining masses of red peppers and green, peppers, and vast earthen bowls
with yellow peas soaking in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal
sort, especially dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bouquets, perhaps
for church offerings. There were mounds of chestnuts, four or five feet
high and wide; and these flowers and fruits filled the interior of the
market, while the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the outside.
There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there were ladies
buying, but it is said that the mistresses commonly send their maids for
the daily provision.
Ordinarily I should say you could not go amiss for your profit and
pleasure in Seville, but there are certain imperative objects of
interest like the Casa de Pilatos which you really have to do. Strangely
enough, it is very well worth doing, for, though it is even more
factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost as great beauty
and of greater dignity. Gardens, galleries, staircases, statues,
paintings, all are interesting, with a mingled air of care and neglect
which is peculiarly charming, though perhaps the keener sensibilities,
the morbider nerves may suffer from the glare and hardness of the tiling
which render the place so wonderful and so exquisite. One must complain
of something, and I complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house
being supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem.
It belongs to the Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more comes to it from
Madrid than the Duke of Alva comes to his house, which I somehow
perversely preferred. For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven
_patios,_ all far more forgotten than the four in the House of Pilate,
and I could fully glut my love of _patios_ without seeing half of them.
Besides, it was in the charge of a typical Spanish family: a lean,
leathery, sallow father, a fat, immovable mother, and a tall, silent
daughter. The girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its
fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy walls,
its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy
staircase leading to the family rooms overhead, which we could not see.
The family stays for a little time only in the spring and fall, but if
ever they stay so late as we had come the sunlight lying so soft and
warm in the _patio_ and the garden out of it must have made them as
sorry to leave it as we were.
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