in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see
a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away
before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at
Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. At Cordova we learned
that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of
usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the
very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up from
their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and the
_aficionados,_ who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest of
Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more
bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights,
till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we
would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even
more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville
is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty
arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision.
By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had
been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the
last _espada_ dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last bull
transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other _toreros,_ the
_banderilleros_ with their darts and the picadors with their
disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena. Such is
the force of a high resolve in strangers bent upon a lesson of
civilization to a barbarous people when disappointed of their purpose.
But we learned too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting
in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the
cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they somehow pull
themselves together and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet in