't seen a tree for nearly three years,' she sobbed.

But the hag was pressing the doctor to drink with her; he accepted
without much hesitation, and gallantly proposed her health.

'What are you going to do?' he said to the younger woman, she was hardly
more than a girl. 'You'd better not hang about in Seville or you'll get
into trouble again.'

'Oh no,' she said, 'I'm going to my village--_mi pueblo_--this
afternoon. I want to see my husband and my child.'

Don Felipe turned to me and asked what I thought of the Seville prison.
I made some complimentary reply.

'Are English prisons like that?' he asked.

I said I did not think so.

'Are they better?'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'I'm told,' he said, 'that two years' hard labour in an English prison
kills a man.'

'The English are a great nation,' I replied.

'And a humane one,' he added, with a bow and a smile.

I bade him good-morning.

XXIII

[Sidenote: Before the Bull-fight]

If all Andalusians are potential gaol-birds they are also potential
bull-fighters. It is impossible for foreigners to realise how firmly the
love of that pastime is engrained in all classes. In other countries the
gift that children love best is a box of soldiers, but in Spain it is a
miniature ring with tin bulls, _picadors_ on horseback and _toreros_.
From their earliest youth boys play at bull-fighting, one of them taking
the bull's part and charging with the movements peculiar to that animal,
while the rest make passes with their coats or handkerchiefs. Often, to
increase the excitement of the game, they have two horns fixed on a
piece of wood. You will see them playing it at every street corner all
day long, and no amusement can rival it; with the result that by the
time a boy is fifteen he has acquired considerable skill in the
exercise, and a favourite entertainment then is to hire a bull-calf for
an afternoon and practise with it. Every urchin in Andalusia knows the
names of the most prominent champions and can tell you their merits.

The bull-fight is the national spectacle; it excites Spaniards as
nothing else can, and the death of a famous _torero_ is more tragic than
the loss of a colony. Seville looks upon itself as the very home and
centre of the art. The good king Ferdinand VII.--as precious a rascal as
ever graced a throne--founded in Seville the first academy for the
cultivation of tauromachy, and bull-fighters swagger through the Sierpes
in great num