to
see it for me. I myself do not expect to return to Cordova.

IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

Cordova seemed to cheer up as much as we at our going. We had
undoubtedly had the better night's sleep; as often as we woke we found
Cordova awake, walking and talking, and coughing more than the night
before, probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. From time to time
there were church-bells, variously like tin pans and iron pots in
tone, without sonorousness in their noise, or such wild clangor as some
Italian church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through it, and at the
station was lively with the arriving and departing trains. The morning
was not only bright; it was hot, and the place babbled with many voices.
We thought one voice crying "Agua, agua!" was a parrot's and then we
thought it was a girl's, but really it was a boy with water for sale in
a stone bottle. He had not a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he
had been a girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red. Some
of the elder women wore mantillas, but these wore flowers too, and were
less pleasing than pathetic for it; one very massive matron was less
pleasing and more pathetic than the rest. Peasant women carried bunches
of chickens by the legs, and one had a turkey in a rush bag with a
narrow neck to put its head out of for its greater convenience in
gobbling. At the door of the station a donkey tried to bite a fly on
its back; but even a Spanish donkey cannot do everything. There was no
attempt to cheat us in the weight of our trunks, as there often is in
Italy, and the _mozo_ who put us and our hand-bags into the train was
content with his reasonable fee. As for the pair of Civil Guards who
were to go with us, they were of an insurpassable beauty and propriety,
and we felt it a peculiar honor when one of them got into the
compartment beside ours.

We were to take the mail-train to Seville; and in Spain the _correo_
is next to the Sud-Express, which is the last word in the vocabulary of
Peninsular railroading. Our _correo_ had been up all night on the
way from Madrid, and our compartment had apparently been used as a
bedchamber, with moments of supper-room. It seemed to have been occupied
by a whole family; there were frowsy pillows crushed into the corners of
the seats, and, though a porter caught these away, the cigar stubs,
and the cigarette ashes strewing the rug and fixed in it with various
liquids, as well as some scatterin