But I Fling Them All Down Here For Him To Do What He
Likes With, And Turn To Speak At More Length Of The University, Or,
Rather The University Church, Which I Would Not Have Any Reader Of Mine
Fail To Visit.
X
With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange
peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in the _patio_
play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play
in our own land.
While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it
and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait for
the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found the
booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise of
recitation from the windows looking into the _patio_ followed us
up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed
library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities of
some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One, who
seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the
place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long,
for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the
books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty
thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without
examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value
was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to
unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful _retablo_ carved in wood
and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there are
two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are
stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of
impressiveness. Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez
de Ribera and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had
visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have copied it from the
House of Pilate. Now, as if still continuing his travels, he reposes
with his wife in a sort of double-decker monument, where the Evil One
would have them suggest to the beholder the notion of passengers in the
upper and lower berths of a Pullman sleeper.
Of all the Spanish cities that I saw, Seville was the most charming, not
for those attributive blandishments of the song and dance which the
tourist is supposed to find it, but which we quite failed of, but for
the simpler and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich in.
I have tried to hint at these, but really one must go to Seville for
them and let them happen as they will. Many happened in our hotel where
we liked everybody, from the kindly, most capable Catalonian head waiter
to the fine-headed little Napoleonic-looking waiter who had identified
us at San Sebastian as Americans, because we spoke "quicklier" than the
English, and who ran to us when we came into the hotel and shook hands
with its as if we were his oldest and dearest friends.
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