Peculiar We
Then Thought It, Though We Learned Afterward That Poultry-Farming Was
Not Uncommon On The Flat Roofs Of Seville, And There Is Now No Telling
How We Might Have Prospered If We Had Taken Those Rooms And Stocked Our
Roof With Plymouth Rocks And Wyandottes.
At the moment, however, we
thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,
and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.
Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic
chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was
so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock
in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal
made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, _"Caliente,
caliente,"_ and her voice would have quieted the street under our
windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew
trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville;
how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had
to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what
they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than
coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go,
but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left
the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran
for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she
did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting
to the Spanish poor.
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