e wineshop a smell of anise and a sound of
water dripping. When he had smacked his lips over a small cup of thick
yellow wine he pointed at the _arriero_. "He says people don't enjoy
life in America."

"But in America people are very rich," shouted the barkeeper, a
beet-faced man whose huge girth was bound in a red cotton sash, and he
made a gesture suggestive of coins, rubbing thumb and forefinger
together.

Everybody roared derision at the _arriero_. But he persisted and went
out shaking his head and muttering "That's no life for a man."

As we left the wineshop where the blackish man was painting with broad
strokes the legend of the West, the _arriero_ explained to me almost
tearfully that he had not meant to speak ill of my country, but to
explain why he did not want to emigrate. While he was speaking we
passed a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us in jingle of
mulebells and in dizzying sweetness of bubbling ferment. A sombre man
with beetling brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart, brown feet
firmly planted in the steaming slush of grapes, flushed face tilted
towards the ferocious white sun, a small child with a black curly pate
rode in triumph, shouting, teeth flashing as if to bite into the sun.

"What you mean is," said I to the _arriero_, "that this is the life for
a man."

He tossed his head back in a laugh of approval.

"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work?"

"That's it," he answered, and cried, "_arrh he_" to the donkey.

We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bellied suddenly in the back as
a cool wind frisked about us at the corner of the road.

"Ah, it smells of the sea," said the _arriero_. "We'll see the sea from
the next hill."

That night as I stumbled out of the inn door in Motril, overfull of
food and drink, the full moon bulged through the arches of the cupola
of the pink and saffron church. Everywhere steel-green shadows striped
with tangible moonlight. As I sat beside my knapsack in the plaza,
groping for a thought in the bewildering dazzle of the night, three
disconnected mules, egged on by a hoarse shouting, jingled out of the
shadow. When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-glare beside the
fountain, it became evident that they were attached to a coach, a
spidery coach tilted forward as if it were perpetually going down hill;
from inside smothered voices like the strangled clucking of fowls being
shipped to market in a coop.

On the driver's