from the public court. This was kept at the outer end by an
"old rancid Christian" smoking incessant cigarettes and not explicitly
refusing to sell us picture postals after taking our entrance fee; the
other end was held by a young, blond, sickly-looking girl, who made us
take small nosegays at our own price and whom it became a game to see if
we could escape. I have left saying to the last that the king and queen
of Spain have a residence in the Alcazar, and that when they come in
the early spring they do not mind corning to it through that plebeian
quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if I could go back there next
spring.

IV

We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for
us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, but we were not proof against
the chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in
Seville. The decent place was filled with the "plain people," who sat
with their hats on at rude tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall
glasses. They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly
all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these
also had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and
untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in
their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man
among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and
posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest
unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse
cries of "Ole!" It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment
of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house
its money's worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that
little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the
audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck,
and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have
equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wildest in nature
and boldest in art was there, and now the house went mad with its
hand-clappings and table-hammerings and deep-throated "Oles!"

Another night we went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and
saw the instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the _haute
ecole._ The academy used to be free to a select public, but now the
chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels, must pay ten
pese