It Was A Mean-Looking Street, Unswept And Otherwise Unkempt, With The Usual Yellowish Or Grayish Buildings, Rather Low And Rather New, As If Prompted By A Mistaken Modern Enterprise.

They were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles.

An alguazil - I am certain he was an alguazil, though he looked like an Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked hat - loitered into a police station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street except those _bouffe_ boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms. Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by the populace from a poetic admirer, I do not know, but I hope it is now in the keeping of some dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will wear it while murmuring through her lattice to her _novio_ on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to be worn as a veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and _could_ hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the grille, with one little olive hand, so that the _novio_ would think it was a black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift from him, it would be all right, anyway.

Our visit to Spain did not wholly realize my early dreams of that romantic land, and yet it had not been finally destitute of incident. Besides, _we_ had not gone very far into the country; a third block might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on the steamer before three o'clock, and we dared not go beyond the second. Even within this limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance was satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience, and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it, and were young and hopeful, and had some one to share one's youth and hope, that Spanish street, which was all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its charm.

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