If I Did
Not Admire These Enough, Again I Cannot Forgive Myself, But She Seemed
Satisfied With What I Did,
And she talked on about him, not too
loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably as a mother should, and proudly
as
The mother of such a boy should, though without vainglory; I have
forgotten to say that she had a certain distinction of face, and was
appropriately dressed in black. By this time we felt that a head-stall
for such a donkey as I was going to buy was not enough to get of such
people, and I added a piece of embroidered leather such as goes in Spain
on the front of a donkey's saddle; if we could not use it so, in final
defect of the donkey, we could put it on a veranda chair. The saddler
gave it at so low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly abated
something from the visual demand, and when we did not try to beat him
down, his wife went again into that inner room and came out with an
iron-holder of scarlet flannel backed with canvas, and fringed with
magenta, and richly inwrought with a Moorish design, in white, yellow,
green, and purple. I say Moorish, because one must say something, but if
it was a pattern of her own invention the gift was the more precious
when she bestowed it on the sister of one of the architects of the
Escuela Mann. That led to more conversation about the Escuela Mann, and
about the graduate of it who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we
all grew such friends, and so proud of one another, and of the country
so wide open to the talents without cost to them, that when I asked her
if she would not sometime be going to America, her husband answered
almost fiercely in his determination, "I am going when I have learned
English!" and to prove that this was no idle boast, he pronounced some
words of our language at random, but very well. We parted in a glow of
reciprocal esteem and I still think of that quarter-hour as one of my
happiest; and whatever others may say, I say that to have done such a
favor to one Spanish family as the Escuela Mann had been the means of
our nation doing this one was a greater thing than to have taken Cuba
from Spain and bought the Philippines when we had seized them already
and had led the Filipinos to believe that we meant to give their islands
to them.
IV
Suddenly, on the way home to our very English hotel, the air of Ronda
seemed charged with English. We were already used to the English of our
young guide, which so far as it went, went firmly and courageously after
forethought and reflection for each sentence, but we were not quite
prepared for the English of two polite youths who lifted their hats as
they passed us and said, "Good afternoon." The general English lasted
quite overnight and far into the next day when we found several natives
prepared to try it on us in the pretty Alameda, and learned from one,
who proved to be the teacher of it in the public school, that there were
some twenty boys studying it there:
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