e from the State, and a
charitable public sees that he does not absolutely starve; he has
cigarettes to smoke--to say that a blind man cannot enjoy tobacco is
evidently absurd--and therefore, all these things being so, why should
he think life such a woeful matter? While it lasts the sun is there to
shine equally on rich and poor, and afterwards will not a paternal
government find a grave in the public cemetery? It is true that the
beggar shares it with quite a number of worthy persons, doubtless most
estimable corpses, and his coffin even is but a temporary
convenience--but still, what does it matter?

XXXVI

[Sidenote: The Song]

But the Moorish influence is nowhere more apparent than in the Spanish
singing. There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those
long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills. The sounds are
strange to the ear accustomed to less barbarous harmonies, and at first
no melody is perceived; it is custom alone which teaches the sad and
passionate charm of these things. A _malaguena_ is the particular
complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover, of the peasant who
ploughs his field in the declining day. The long notes of such a song,
floating across the silence of the night, are like a new melody on the
great harpsichord of human sorrow. No emotion is more poignant than that
given by the faint sad sounds of a Spanish song as one wanders through
the deserted streets in the dead of night; or far in the country, with
the sun setting red in the cloudless sky, when the stillness is broken
only by the melancholy chanting of a shepherd among the olive-trees.

An heritage of Moordom is the Spanish love for the improvisation of
well-turned couplets; in olden days a skilful verse might procure the
poet a dress of cloth-of-gold, and it did on one occasion actually
raise a beggar-maid to a royal throne: even now it has power to secure
the lover his lady's most tender smiles, or at the worst a glass of
Manzanilla. The richness of the language helps him with his rhymes, and
his southern imagination gives him manifold subjects. But, being the
result of improvisation--no lady fair would consider the suit of a
gallant who could not address her in couplets of his own devising--the
Spanish song has a peculiar character. The various stanzas have no
bearing upon one another; they consist of four or seven lines, but in
either case each contains its definite sentiment; so that one