You
Must Not Stray Far From The Beaten Path Of Your Immediate Wants, But In
This You Are Safe.
At San Sebastian we had even a wider range with the
English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with a
fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I began to flounder in
the language which I had read so much and spoken so little or none.
He
had been a year in London, he said, and he took us for English, though,
now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we
spoke "quicklier" than the English. We did not protest; it was the
mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined to get
from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not the
English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we asked for a
fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared there was no fuel; and,
though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night,
she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would not have it. The cold
abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which
had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the
first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine,
which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive
summer farther south.
IV
In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque
cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above the
legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen.
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