As
A Matter Of Taste In Vegetation, However, We Preferred An Occasional
Effect Of Mixed Orange And Pomegranate Trees, With Their Perennial Green
And Their Autumnal Red.
We were, in fact, so spoiled by the profusion of
these little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to
the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of
pale-pink shrimps.
He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, when we had
got, without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough,
no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very agreeable-looking
booth at the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto Rico
coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of it there were
wash-basins and clean towels. I do not know how an old woman with a
blind daughter made herself effective in the crowd, which did not seem
much preoccupied with the opportunities of ablution and refection at
that booth; but perhaps she begged with her blind daughter's help while
the crowd was busy in assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and Malaga
and Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and
romance.
II
A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the
loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the
octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who
looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties,
eased us - not very swiftly, but softly - through the local customs, and
then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we
had decided we would have rooms on the _patio._ We had still to learn
that if there is a _patio_ in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms in
it, because they are either in repair or they are occupied.
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