ild contains more
than a million fleas, and as they can't scratch all the time, they keep
on the move, hoping the fleas will jump off on somebody else. When we
came here we were flealess, but every person we have come near to seems
to have contributed some fleas to us, until now we are loaded down
with them, and we find in our room at the hotel a box of insect powder,
which, is charged in with the candles. The king, who is a boy about
three years older than I am, is full of fleas, too, and he jumps around
from one place to another, like he was shaking himself to get rid of
them. He gets up in the morning and goes out horseback riding, and jumps
fences and rides tip and down the marble steps of the public buildings,
as though he wanted to make the fleas feel in danger, so they will
leave him. Seems to me if every man kept as many dogs as they do in
Constantinople, the fleas would take to the dogs, but they say here that
fleas will leave a dog to get on a human being, because they like the
smell of garlic, as every Spaniard eats garlic a dozen times a day. They
are trying to teach dogs to eat garlic, but no self-respecting dog will
touch it. We have had to fill up on garlic in order to be able to talk
with the people, cause dad got sea sick the first day here, everybody
smelled so oniony. Dad wanted a druggist to put up onions in capsules,
like they do quinine, so he could take onions and not taste them, but
he couldn't make the man understand. There ought to be a law against any
person eating onions, unless he is under a death sentence. But you can
stand a man with the onion habit, after you get used to it. It is a
woman, a beautiful woman, one you would like to have take you on your
lap and pet you, that ought to know better than to eat onions. Gee, but
when you see a woman that is so beautiful it makes her ache to carry her
beauty around, and you get near to her and expect to breathe the odor of
roses and violets, that makes you tired when she opens her mouth to say
soft words of love, and there comes to your nostrils the odor of onions.
Do you know, nothing would make me commit suicide so quick as to have
a wife who habitually loaded herself with onions. Dad was buying some
candy for me at a confectioner shop, of a beautiful Spanish woman, and
when he asked how much it was, she bent over towards him in the most
bewitching manner and breathed in his face and said, "Quatro-realis,
seignor," which meant "four bits, mister,