seat one's feet were on the shafts and one had a view
of every rag and shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking,
groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers,
cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach
lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation
ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the
sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves
and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of
ash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy inkling of mountains.

Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees at the leading mule,
Cordovan hat on the back of his head, from under which sprouted a lock
of black hair that hung between his eyes over his nose and made him
look like a goblin, the driver bounced and squirmed and kicked at the
flanks of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side to side of the
uneven road. Down into a gulch, across a shingle, up over a plank
bridge, then down again into the bed of the river I had forded that
morning with my friend the _arriero_, along a beach with fishing boats
and little huts where the fishermen slept; then barking of dogs,
another bridge and we roared and crackled up a steep village street to
come to a stop suddenly, catastrophically, in front of a tavern in the
main square.

"We are late," said the goblin driver, turning to me suddenly, "I have
not slept for four nights, dancing, every night dancing."

He sucked the air in through his teeth and stretched out his arms and
legs in the moonlight. "Ah, women ... women," he added philosophically.
"Have you a cigarette?"

"_Ah, la juventud_," said the old man who had brought the mailbag. He
looked up at us scratching his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a
_momentito_, and it's gone! Old men work in the day time, but young men
work at night.... _Ay de mi_," and he burst into a peal of laughter.

And as if some one were whispering them, the words of Jorge Manrique
sifted out of the night:

?Que se hizo el Rey Don Juan?
Los infantes de Aragon
?Que se hicieron?
Que fue de tanto galan,
Que fue de tanta invencion,
Como truxeron?

Everybody went into the tavern, from which came a sound of singing and
of clapping in time, and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging on
tables as might have come out of the _Mermaid_ in the days of the
Virgin Queen. Outside the moon soared,