t no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing
sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent
savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to
the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and
physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated
with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order
of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells,
especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does
not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy
quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well
as nose, were all stenches.

Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged
children running beside us and after us and screaming, "Minny, niooney,
_ money!"_ in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the
door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the
thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the
sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and
some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with
both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the
road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented
a hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could
persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street
in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled
the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast
from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot
in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might
have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such
horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than
infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid
foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing
steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through
whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I
scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside,
and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir,
painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.

After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left
except to