The Elder Of The
Daughters Had Some Useful French, And Neither Of The Younger Ladies Ever
Stayed For Some Ultimate Details Of Dishabille In Coming To Interpret
The Mother And Ourselves To One Another When We Encountered Her Alone In
The Office.
They were all thoroughly kind and nice, and they were
supported with surpassing intelligence and ability by the _chico,_ a
radiant boy of ten, who united in himself the functions which the
amiable inefficiency of the porters and waiters abandoned to him.
When we came out to dinner after settling ourselves in our almost
obtrusively accessible rooms, we were convinced of the wisdom of our
choice of a hotel by finding our dear Chilians at one of the tables. We
rushed together like two kindred streams of transatlantic gaiety, and in
our mingled French, Spanish, and English possessed one another of our
doubts and fears in coming to our common conclusion. We had already seen
a Spanish gentleman whom we knew as a fellow-sufferer at Burgos, roaming
the streets of Valladolid, and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt,
interrogating the windows of our hotel; and now we learned from the
Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in the inn which a
patrician omnibus had borne him away to from our envious eyes at the
station. We learned that our South American compatriots had found their
own chosen hotel impossible, and were now lodged in rapturous
satisfaction under our roof. Their happiness penetrated us with a glow
of equal content, and confirmed us in the resolution always to take the
worst omnibus at a Spanish station as the sure index of the best hotel.
The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through
lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances,
groaned unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and
we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the promenade
below already astir with life: not the exuberant young life of the night
before, but still sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A
crippled newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying his papers;
an Englishman was looking at a plan of Valladolid in a shop window; a
splendid cavalry officer went by in braided uniform, and did not stare
so hard as they might have expected at some ladies passing in mantillas
to mass or market. In the late afternoon as well as the early morning we
saw a good deal of the military in Valladolid, where an army corps is
stationed. From time to time a company of infantry marched through the
streets to gay music, and toward evening slim young officers began to
frequent the arcades and glass themselves in the windows of the shops,
their spurs clinking on the pavement as they lounged by or stopped and
took distinguished attitudes. We speculated in vain as to their social
quality, and to this day I do not know whether "the career is open to
the talents" in the Spanish army, or whether military rank is merely the
just reward of civil rank.
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