soared brilliant, a greenish
blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar.
The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of
quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme
burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in
a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest
contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the
white wall standing very quiet a man looking up with dilated
nostrils--_el amor_.

As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady way out of town, our ears
still throbbed with the rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown hands
clapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors. From the last house
of the village a man hallooed. With its noise of cupboards of china
overturned the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-faced man with
a little waxed moustache like the springs of a mousetrap climbed on the
front seat, while burly people heaved quantities of corded trunks on
behind.

"How late, two hours late," the man spluttered, jerking his checked cap
from side to side. "Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiled
eggs.... Think of that. _!Que incultura! !Que pueblo indecente!_ All
day only two boiled eggs."

"I had business in Motril, Don Antonio," said the goblin driver
grinning.

"Business!" cried Don Antonio, laughing squeakily, "and after all what
a night!"

Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio the story of King Mycerinus
of Egypt that Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he would only
live ten years, the king called for torches and would not sleep, so
crammed twenty years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened in
intervals between his hoarse investigations of the private life of the
grandmother of the leading mule.

Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cigarette and cried, "In
Andalusia we all do that, don't we, Paco?"

"Yes, sir," said the goblin driver, nodding his head vigorously.

"That is _lo flamenco_," cried Don Antonio. "The life of Andalusia is
_lo flamenco_."

The moon has begun to lose foothold in the black slippery zenith. We
are hurtling along a road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of
unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of a
dancer. The goblin driver rolls from side to side asleep. The check cap
is down over the little man's face so that not even his moustaches are
to be seen. All at once the l