Seven Pesetas Was
The Monstrous Asking Price, But We Beat It Down To Five And A Half, And
Then Came A Trying Moment:
We could not carry a Cordovese in
tissue-paper through the streets of Tarifa, but could we ask our guide,
who was also our armed escort, to carry it?
He simplified the situation
by taking it himself and bearing it back to the _fonda_ as proudly as if
he had not also worn a sword at his side; and we parted there in a
kindness which I should like to think he shared equally with us.
He was practically the last of those Spaniards who were always winning
my heart (save in the bank at Valladolid where they must have
misunderstood me), and whom I remember with tenderness for their
courtesy and amiability. In little things and large, I found the
Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese commercial traveler say
of them in Venice fifty years ago: "They are the honestest people in
Europe." In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which
English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader
asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the
Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty,
treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of
bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they
should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know.
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