It Is At Least Pre-Eminent In A Feature Of The
Women's Costume Which You Are Promised At The First Mention Of The
Place, And Which Is Said To Be A Survival Of The Moslem Civilization.
Of
course we were eager for it, and when we came into the first wide
street, there at the
Principal corner three women were standing, just as
advertised, with black skirts caught up from their waists over their
heads and held before their faces so that only one eye could look out at
the strangers. It was like the women's costtime at Chiozza on the
Venetian lagoon, but there it is not claimed for Moorish and here it was
authenticated by being black. "Moorish ladies," our guide proudly
proclaimed them in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish;
if they were really Orientals, they followed us with those eyes single
as daringly as if they had been of our own Christian Occident.
The event was so perfect in its way that it seemed as if our guiding
policeman might have especially ordered it; but this could not have
really been, and was no such effect of his office as the immunity from
beggars which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in Tarifa (we did
not identify him) dared not approach for a big-dog or a little, and we
were safe from the boldest blind man, the hardiest hag, however
pockmarked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas were clean as
though our guide had them newly swept for us, and the plaza of the
principal church (no guide-book remembers its name) is perhaps the
cleanest in all Spain.
VI
The church itself we found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond
the promise of the rather bare outside. A painted window above the door
cast a glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the
comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved and
gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our policeman for
the time said was done by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice
was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender columns and a
vault brilliantly swirled over with decorations of the effect of peacock
feathers. But above all there was on a small side altar a figure of the
Child Jesus dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a Spanish
shepherd, with a silver crook in one hand and leading a toy lamb by a
string in the other. Our young guide took the image down for us to look
at, and showed its shepherd's dress with peculiar satisfaction; and then
he left it on the ground while he went to show us something else. When
we came back we found two small boys playing with the Child, putting its
hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them,
not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will
agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident
irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and
He were all of one family and they were at home with Him there.
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