being left by the omnibus about a block from our hotel, on the border of
a sort of promenade where no vehicles were allowed. We had been halted
near a public fountain, where already the mothers and daughters of the
neighborhood were gathered with earthen jars for the night's supply of
water. The jars were not so large as to overburden any of them when,
after just delay for exchange of gossip, the girls and goodwives put
them on their heads and marched erectly away with them, each beautifully
picturesque irrespective of her age or looks.

The air was soft, and after Burgos, warm; something southern, unfelt
before, began to qualify the whole scene, which as the evening fell grew
more dramatic, and made the promenade the theater of emotions permitted
such unrestricted play nowhere else in Spain, so far as we were witness.
On one side the place was arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not
so obtrusively brilliant that the young people who walked up and down
before them were in a glare of publicity. A little way off the avenue
expanded into a fine oblong place, where some first martyrs of the
Inquisition were burned. But the promenadefs kept well short of this, as
they walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked in that
inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the world over. They
were in the standard proportion of two girls to one young man, or, if
here and there a girl had an undivided young man to herself, she went
before some older maiden or matron whom she left altogether out of the
conversation. They mostly wore the skirts and hats of Paris, and if the
scene of the fountain was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost
Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there by hundreds; they
filled the avenue from side to side, and

The delight of happy laughter
The delight of low replies