ng.

Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car
keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I
was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys
on the bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more
than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with
those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers
of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what passed
in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her
bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

It is always a question how much or little we had better know about
the history of a strange country when seeing it. If the great mass of
travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in favor of
knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not say they
would be altogether unwise. History itself is often of two minds about
the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away
its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual
conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the misfits. What did it
avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the
Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted
away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but
the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals
were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all
characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next
history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me
the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.

I

Before I left Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against
his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the
city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from
his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this
_Seville in the Hand,_ as it calls itself, but I got it too late for
use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those
directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious
past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in,
and holds with historians who accept the Phoenicians as the sufficiently
remote founders of Sevil