f cheers and hand-clapping. My friend stopped still
and put his hand on my arm.

"There goes Belmonte," he said; "half the men who are cheering him have
never had enough to eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better; to
keep people quiet they filled their bellies. Those fools--" he jerked
his head backwards with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the high
combs and the hair gleaming black under lace and the wasp-waists of the
young men and the insolence of black eyes above the flashing wheels of
the carriages, "--those fools give only circuses. Do you people in the
outside world realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have starved
for generations, that those black bulls for the circuses may graze over
good wheatland ... to make Spain picturesque! The only time we see meat
is in the bullring. Those people who argue all the time as to why
Spain's backward and write books about it, I could tell them in one
word: malnutrition." He laughed despairingly and started walking fast
again. "We have solved the problem of the cost of living. We live on
air and dust and bad smells."

I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes before to ask an address,
and had been taken into the back room with the wonderful enthusiastic
courtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the bookseller, a carpenter
and the bookseller's errand-boy had all talked at once, explaining the
last strike of farm-laborers, when the region had been for months under
martial law, and they, and every one else of socialist or republican
sympathies, had been packed for weeks into overcrowded prisons. They
all regretted they could not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, they
explained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupying it at that moment. It
ended by the bookseller's coming out with me to show me the way to
Azorin's.

Azorin was an architect who had supported the strikers; he had just
come back to Cordova from the obscure village where he had been
imprisoned through the care of the military governor who had paid him
the compliment of thinking that even in prison he would be dangerous in
Cordova. He had recently been elected municipal councillor, and when we
reached his office was busy designing a schoolhouse. On the stairs the
bookseller had whispered to me that every workman in Cordova would die
for Azorin. He was a sallow little man with a vaguely sarcastic voice
and an amused air as if he would burst out laughing at any moment. He
put aside his plans