changed from our rooms in the rear of the hotel to
others in the front, where we entered intimately into the life of the
Plaza San Fernando as far as we might share it from our windows. It was
not very active life; even the cabmen whose neat victorias bordered
the place on three sides were not eager for custom; they invited the
stranger, but they did not urge; there was a continual but not a rapid
passing through the ample oblong; there was a good deal of still life on
the benches where leisure enjoyed the feathery shadow of the palms,
for the sun was apt to be too hot at the hour of noon, though later it
conduced to the slumber which in Spain accompanies the digestion of the
midday meal in all classes. As the afternoon advanced numbers of little
girls came into the plaza and played children's games which seemed a
translation of games familiar to our own country. One evening a small
boy was playing with them, but after a while he seemed to be found
unequal to the sport; he was ejected from the group and went off
gloomily to grieve apart with his little thumb in his mouth. The sight
of his dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried what a
copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort him. He took it without
looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming
at the first corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening--in fact,
after the night had fairly fallen--we saw him making his way into a
house fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in
the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no word
of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door open he backed
into the interior still facing us and so fading from our sight and
knowledge.

He had the touch of comedy which makes pathos endurable, but another
incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an antiquity shop near
the cathedral one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near the
Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of the same second youth, who
gently and jointly pronounced to us the magical word _encajes._ Rather,
they questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly,
that we should come to their house with them to see those laces, which
of course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one of
us twain who was singly concerned in _encajes_ had fatigued and perhaps
overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and she signified a regret
which they di