V

PHASES OF MADRID


I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black
wine-skins of Old Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those
which began to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I
am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness
from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs in the
south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a difference in the
color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the
treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more
black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from
the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands.
Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown,
corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths
and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do
not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed
himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him, and
able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his
youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet
with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness of
a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared
himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going,
especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition