and Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and
romance.




II


A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the
loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the
octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who
looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties,
eased us--not very swiftly, but softly--through the local customs, and
then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we
had decided we would have rooms on the _patio._ We had still to learn
that if there is a _patio_ in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms in
it, because they are either in repair or they are occupied. In the
present case they were occupied; but we could have rooms over the
street, which were the same as in the _patio,_ and which were perfectly
quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley-cars grinding and squealing
under their windows. The manager (if that was the quality of the patient
and amiable old official who received us) seemed surprised to see the
cars there, perhaps because they were so inaudible; but he said we could
have rooms in the annex, fronting on the adjoining plaza and siding on
an inoffensive avenue where there were absolutely no cars. The
interior, climbing to a lofty roof by a succession of galleries, was
hushed by four silent senoras, all in black, and seated in mute ceremony
around a table in chairs from which their little feet scarcely touched
the marble pavement. Their quiet confirmed the manager's assurance of a