variety is amazing, men and women and children;
and Seville at fair-time, or when the foreigners are coming for Holy
Week, is like an enormous hospital. Mendicants assail you on all sides,
the legless dragging themselves on their hands, the halt running towards
you with a crutch, the blind led by wife or child, the deaf and dumb,
the idiotic. I remember a woman with dead eyes and a huge hydrocephalic
head, who sat in a bath-chair by one of the cathedral doors, and
whenever people passed, cried shrilly for money in a high, unnatural
voice. Sometimes they protrude maimed limbs, feetless legs or arms
without hands; they display loathsome wounds, horribly inflamed; every
variety of disease is shown to extort a copper. And so much is it a
recognised trade that they have their properties, as it were: one old
man whose legs had been shot away, trotted through the narrow streets of
Seville on a diminutive ass, driving it into the shop-doors to demand
his mite. Then there are the children, the little boys and girls that
Murillo painted, barely covered by filthy rags, cherubs with black hair
and shining eyes, the most importunate of all the tribe. The refusal of
a halfpenny is followed impudently by demands for a cigarette, and as a
last resort for a match; they wander about with keen eyes for
cigar-ends, and no shred of a smoked leaf is too diminutive for them to
get no further use from it.

And beside all these are the blind fiddlers, scraping out old-fashioned
tunes that were popular thirty years ago; the guitarists, singing the
_flamenco_ songs which have been sung in Spain ever since the Moorish
days; the buffoons, who extract tunes from a broomstick; the owners of
performing dogs.

They are a picturesque lot, neither vicious nor ill-humoured. Begging is
a fairly profitable trade, and not a very hard one; in winter _el pobre_
can always find a little sunshine, and in summer a little shade. It is
no hardship for him to sit still all day; he would probably do little
else if he were a millionaire. He looks upon life without bitterness;
Fate has not been very kind, but it is certainly better to be a live
beggar than a dead king, and things might have been ten thousand times
worse. For instance, he might not have been born a Spaniard, and every
man in his senses knows that Spain is the greatest nation on earth,
while to be born a citizen of some other country is the most dreadful
misfortune that can befall him. He has his licenc