wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back wonderfully soon to say
the cab would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with
self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded his promptness.
In the mean time we feigned a small need which we satisfied by a
purchase, and then the grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and
made us his guests while his other customers came and went. They came
oftener than they went, for our interest in them did not surpass their
interest in us. We felt that through this we reflected credit upon our
amiable host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread
through the neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people who
did not all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most,
interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle which
the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured its weight in
chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the bottle with oil and
weighed it, and then he gave the peas along with it to his customers. It
seemed a pretty convention, though we could not quite make out its
meaning, unless the peas were bestowed as a sort of bonus; but the next
convention was clearer to us. An old man in black corduroy with a
clean-shaven face and a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought
a whole dried stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat instead of salt cod)
talking loudly to the grocer and at us while the grocer cut it across in
widths of two inches and folded it into a neat pocketful; then a glass
of wine was poured from a cask behind the counter, and the customer
drank it off in honor of the transaction with the effect also of
pledging us with his keen eyes; all the time he talked, and he was
joined in conversation by a very fat woman who studied us not unkindly.
Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent purpose but to
verify our outlandish presence and to hear my occasional Spanish, which
was worth hearing if for nothing but the effort it cost me. The grocer
accepted with dignity the popularity we had won him, and when at last