not the hotel's that it seemed as far from the
station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances,
have, been _a_ merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of
the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the _patio_ which had
formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter
welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the
young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their
location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing
alley, the interpreter made himself still more our friend and called
mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we wished _interiores_ and
would take nothing else, though he must have known that no such rooms
were to be had. He even abetted us in visiting the rooms on the _patio_
and satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the waiter
brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in the house beside
our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the
inevitable. They declared that the people whom we heard uninterruptedly
clattering and chattering by in the street below, and the occasional
tempest of wheels and bells and hoofs that clashed up to us would be the
very last to pass through there that night, and they gave such good and
sufficient reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must.
Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were
wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got
any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but
I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep
within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away
in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of
Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular
despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening
from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained
measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an
exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there
remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has
ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage
lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this belief because
when we came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we
had not the courage to g