It Has
A Large Low-Vaulted Interior, With The Carts And Wagons Of The Muleteers
At The Right Of The
Entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules
where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing uninterestedly
round at
The intruders, for plainly we were not of the guests who
frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those around and behind the
stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money a day;
they supply their own bed and board and pay five cents more for the use
of a fire.
Some guests were coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous
spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal.
An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the
_patio_ overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen
watei jar, dim red; piles of straw mats, which were perhaps the bedding
of the guests, heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the
guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a
Greek perfection of profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference
that contrasted strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound
beside one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his
hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the
effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation
in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been in a
retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever
unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I
could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of
_The Illustrious Scullion._ But he seemed on reflection not to push the
matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came
away in mine.
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