The Women Of The People All Wore Flowers In Their
Hair, A Dahlia Or A Marigold, Whether Their Hair Was Black Or Gray.
No
ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her
nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but
men of every class rather swarmed.
High or low, they all wore the kind
of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese:
flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.
I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in
the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that
I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my way
through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of the
man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my
struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate
of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much
labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I
came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to
untangle a little the web that the French and the Aragonese wove in the
conquest and reconquest of the wretched Sicilies; but how was I to
imagine in the Connecticut Western Reserve the scene of Gonsalvo's
victories in Calabria?
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