which leads to a sort of waiting-room, next to
mine; for I hear them laughing and wrangling
with a noisy purposeless vehemence
peculiarly Spanish. As I am not a state-prisoner
or a conspirator, I carefully plug up this
spy-place; which gives me the same sensation
that I once felt on finding a sliding
panel in a suspicions-country inn near Ulm.
One peculiarity of Spanish hotels is, that you
never can be sure of having a bell in your
room; or, if you have, of its being answered
more than once in ten times. You may go out
into the passage and shout down the stairs,
or beat upon the wainscot, still nobody cares
to come, or perhaps ever hears you. In fact,
the Spanish hotel is not at all, and never was,
what we call an hotel. It, in one way,
resembles the Italian furnished lodging, or the
Turkish caravanserai. The rooms are good;
but you must attend on yourself, make your bed,
feed your horse, and procure your own food. If
you want to dine, you must come to the table
d'hôte at half-past five, when neighbours and
regular visitors come there as to an eating-
house. They charge you by the day, not by the
meal. The charge is moderate, but does not
include wine, except you drink from the
common decanters of the landlord's chasse
cousin (chase-cousin), as the French wittily
call the wine they keep to drive away obtrusive
poor relations.

But let me sketch another hotel of a different
type. I am just landed on the quay at
Cadiz, and am going to Blanco's hotel, which
faces the sea, and looks down on the fag-end
of the Alameda and those eternal fishers for
mullet, who balance themselves like young
crows on an elm-branch, on that sea-wall.
I hire a porter, who carries a jereed
stick, and carries grapes, matches, cigarettes,
and a dirty wisp of a red handkerchief in
the black cup-like rim of his montero, and
push off to the custom-house. We drive
past beggars who are smoking cigarettes
for luncheon, and trains of mules, their
head-stalls strung with bells like rows of
foxglove flowers; watch the ginger-coloured
dust spirt from some stone-cutters' saw,
and at last reach the long covered-in stalls
of the fish-market, where eels twist and twine
with a humility deprecatory of the stew-pan
hissing for its savoury victims; where red
mullets with their flushes of scarlet and pearl
seem in a conscious blush at their own
exquisite flavour; or, as a strolling epicure poet
near me mutters to a cassocked priest who
rolls his eyes and whets his lips prophetic of
the feast, "as if they were trying to turn
themselves into cactus flowers." There too are
piles of a sort of smelt; for, Cadiz is the fish
paradise of the epicure, and even in the
Romans' time was the great emporium of
salt fish for the far-reaching, many-palaced
city. These look like whist counters wrought
in silver. All shades of brightening pearl,
sea agate, and cornelian are there on those
stalk; leaning against which, the fishermen,
with tucked-up sleeves, smoke and clatter, and
do battle with far-sounding cursing shrieks,
over difficult labyrinths of bargains. I feast
my eyes on a sea monster, perhaps a sturgeon;
for I could not recognise it by the Spanish
name, Gomenache; which measured four or
five feet long, and lay like a young shark
upon the wet stone slab of the proud captor's
stall. We pass some defiant turbulent
water-sellers, with their jars balanced on a leather
tray, fastened to the left shoulder, with their
money boxes and cases for tumblers fastened
in front of their aprons. We stroll past some
brown masons, working with handkerchiefs
trailed over the back of their head to keep
the scalding heat off the nape and spine;
where the sunbeam daggers are apt to pierce.
Trains of mules, laden with the white sand
or gesso, used for building, pass us tinkling,
tinkling. We look into door-ways, and see
beggar men asleep, with the wet flattened,
stumps of cigarettes between their teeth, and
the green and dull red parings of prickly
pears all around them, in their hermit shady
nooks. This is their siesta, after their meal
on the wild fruit. Thank God, there is no
better sort of sleep for the rich man. In
sleep as in death we are all equal.

Now we turn off sea- ward to the right,
down a sort of court, and come to a porticoed
barn they call the Custom House. We
English passengers:—the florid redundantly
good-natured Yankee-Irish wine merchant,
the bagman all whiskers, with the red suffering
face, the man who swears by Murray,
and compares every place to Constantinople,
where he has never been, and who dresses in
a gamekeepery sort of way, which he thinks
marks the veteran traveller—we are all
there, grumbling, puffing, swearing, chafing,
seeking comfort in cigars, and in preparing
ostentatiously our bunches of keys. A little
army of Atlas porters, with red rope sashes
round their waists, follow us, and condole
and encourage us with timid looks of
defiance cast towards the entrance-gate. Casas
de España! Nothing is ready. The officer is
not come; he may be five minutes, or an
hour; he is a government officer not to be
hurried; he is cheapening red mullet, or at
mass, or out riding, or at his chocolate.
Quien sabe! Dios sabe! Who knows? In
Spain, the only thing ever ready is
unreadiness. Storm a Spanish fort at a dash,
says Ford, and you will find the guns
unloaded, and the gunners at their siesta.
Over the door of the custom-house room is a
scaffold, on which a negro mason stands
plastering in a lazy, lotos-eating way, that,
after the chronic fever of London workers, is
calming and grateful to see. In England, by
mutual fretting, we chafe each other into
feverish action; every day, with us, seems
the last day: only faded, worn-out traditions
talk of yesterday: we live in to-day. But
in Spain men grow lazy by sympathetic
idleness: they live in the morrow. To-morrow