m with
the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him while they sang a
snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar, or talked professional
gossip, and then returning to him with some tormenting expression of
tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could
recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more
satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the
high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and
the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the
proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to
those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither
side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the
life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so
unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean
upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the errors
and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless friendship,
these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed burlesque seemed to
be playing rather than living the life of strolling players; and their
love-making was the last touch of a comedy that Basil could hardly accept
as reality, it was so much more like something seen upon the stage. He
would not have detracted anything from the commonness and cheapness of
the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly,
helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction.
But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessness of the whole
adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his
reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride
in the fact that all this could have happened to him in our commonplace
time and hemisphere. "Why," he thought, "if I were a student in Alcala,
what better could I have asked?" And as at last his soul swung out from
its moorings and lapsed down the broad slowly circling tides out in the
sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtle touch of compassion for
those poor strollers,--a pity so delicate and fine and tender that it
hardly seemed his own but rather a sense of the compassion that pities
the whole world.

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.

The travellers all met at breakfast and duly discussed the adventures of
the night; and for the rest, the forenoon p