mple of
civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was
a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the
time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then,
when the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday
afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on
Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing
concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising
that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could
not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the
arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together
in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see
a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away
before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at
Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. At Cordova we learned
that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of
usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the
very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up
from their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and
the _aficionados,_ who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest
of Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more
bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights,
till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we
would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even
more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville
is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty
arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision.
By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if ther