Three dollars a month get a fair house in
Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant
and a dollar and a half for a maid.
If the Toledans from high to low are
extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the
inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They
scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality;
there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great deal
of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the
streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered
from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other
classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the
other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no
men or women who looked great-world.
Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they
might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like
every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which
looked so pleasant.
The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is
a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish,
but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend
themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their
_patios_ to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact
of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade,
quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces or
palatial houses in my hurried impression. Whatever it may be
industrially or ecclesiastically, Toledo is now socially provincial and
tending to extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were living
in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief
sojourns to mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must
be easy to cherish such an object.
Industrially, of course, one associates it with the manufacture of the
famous Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever,
and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a, New
York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I only got so far
as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller sort in shops open to
the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little pair
of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous marchpane of Toledo
ended in a piece of that pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar.
Not all of the twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in
these specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not asking more about
the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom I
could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my
deficiency.
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