eading mule, taken with suicidal mania,
makes a sidewise leap for the cliff-edge. Crumbling of gravel, snap of
traces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one has managed to yank the mule
back on her hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a coach
totters at the edge of the cliff's shadow.

"_Hija de puta_," cries the goblin driver, jumping to the ground.

Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins to explain querulously that
he has had nothing to eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of the
goblin driver flash white flame as he hangs wreath upon wreath of
profanity about the trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rattling
jerk the coach sways to the safe side of the road. From inside angry
heads are poked out like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop.
Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of triumph: "_?Que
flamenco, eh?_"

When we got to Almunecar Don Antonio, the goblin driver, and I sat at a
little table outside the empty Casino. A waiter appeared from somewhere
with wine and coffee and tough purple ham and stale bread and
cigarettes. Over our heads dusty palm-fronds trembled in occasional
faint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don Antonio's thin fingers
glistened in the light of the one tired electric light bulb that shone
among palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to me the
significance of _lo flamenco_.

The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering song well sung, the couplet
neatly capped, the back turned to the charging bull, the mantilla
draped with exquisite provocativeness; all that was _lo flamenco_.
"On this coast, _senor ingles_, we don't work much, we are dirty and
uninstructed, but by God we live. Why the poor people of the towns,
d'you know what they do in summer? They hire a fig-tree and go and live
under it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eat
the figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains,
and man-alive they are happy. They fear no one and they are dependent
on no one; when they are young they make love and sing to the guitar,
and when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children.
You have travelled much; I have travelled little--Madrid, never
further,--but I swear to you that nowhere in the world are the women
lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in this
vega of Almunecar.... If only the wine weren't quite so heavy...."

"Then you don't want to go to America?"

"_!Hombre por dios!_