believe, that if they can bury a hair from
their enemy's head together with a living
frog, whatever torment the frog suffers will
be shared by the head that grew the hair.
They believe also that they are in the power
of any enemy who finds their spittle, and if
they spit on the ground, most carefully
obliterate the marks, but commonly spit on
their own clothes for safety's sake.

Here is enough told perhaps to give a fair
impression of the state of native civilisation
upon ground that is to yield to the white
man's wealth and power. We part, therefore,
from our clever guide, though we have not
yet gone through a tithe of all the odd things
that he has to show to those whom his book
makes willing companions of his journey.

SPANISH PROVERBS.

THE Spanish proverbs, the floating literature
of Spain, handed down by verbal tradition,
smell of garlic, and orange-peel, and
are as profoundly national as the English
nautical song or the Welsh triad.

They are shot at you, or stabbed into
you, or pelted at you, at every tavern door
and at every table d'hôte. They are the
grace for the sour gaspacho and the
unsavoury salt cod-fish (bacalao). They are
the Spaniard's shield and stiletto. They are
the wisdom of the age before books, and as
Spain changes no more than China, they are
the wisdom of the present day. They are to
the cigarette smoker and melon eater what
quotations are to the club man, and to the
debater in parliament whom country gentlemen
always cheer when he quotes Horace—thinking
it Greek, to show they understand him.
To many who do not think at all they supply
the place of books altogether, and are the
traditional Corpus Juris of traditional wisdom
bequeathed them by their ancestors; who did
think. It might be a question, indeed, worth
the theorist-spinner's while to trace the effect
of these floating proverbs on a race to which
they serve as creeds, statutes, and guides of
life; of which they express the mode of
thought; and, at the same time, influence and
direct it—moulding and being moulded. In
these proverbs we find every phase of the
Spanish mind exemplified—its "pundonor,"
its punctiliousness, its intolerable and mean
pride, its burning fever for revenge, its hardness
that we call cruelty, its love of ease and
pleasure, its unprogressiveness, and its ardent
religious instinct which degenerates to
superstition. For all those pleasant national vices
that brought their own special scourges, these
proverbs have warning or encouragement.
Their kindlier feelings, too, do not pass
uninstanced. Proverbs with wise men are
the small change of wit; but with the
Spaniard they are too often his whole mental
capital. By an apt quotation a good memory
can always appear a genius in Spain, and
proverb writers being all anonymous when
living and forgotten when dead, there is no
indictment in the High Court of Plagiarism
against the appropriator who lets off his
mental firework without saying that he
purchased it, but yet was not the maker. When
a man in England is witty, we suppose the wit
is his own; but when a Spaniard is witty in
rolling diligence or in striving steam-boat,
you may be almost sure it is the proverb of
some contemporary of Cervantes, dead this
two hundred years, that tickles your
diaphragm, and which you swallow with a
smile like a French sweetmeat. It acts as a
sort of mental snuff, pleasantly irritates, and
leaves you refreshed. A man must be very
mentally dyspeptic, indeed, who cannot digest
a proverb without inconvenience or struggle.
If a Spaniard sees you smiling at a Spanish
street group rather overdoing the bowing, as
Spaniards sometimes will, he will say in a
rhyme, "A civil tongue is not expensive, and
it is very profitable." As the old Italians of
Macchiavelli's time used to say: "It is a good
outlay to spoil a hat with often taking it off."
You feel at once that you have heard a
shrewd proverb intended to explain to
worldly people the courtesy of a proud race.

In Ireland, as in Spain, you are often
astonished by wit that appears extemporaneous,
but is really old as Brian Boru—
merely, in fact, an old quotation newly
applied, and picked up as a man might pick
a fossil off the road to fling at his pig. The
first time I met a proverb-monger was in a
Seville steamboat, as I sat watching the
passengers doing homage to the bull-necked,
pig-eyed Commandante, who sat in a state
arm-chair under the striped quarter-deck
awnings. The Commandante was silent, in a
sort of brutal pasha luxury, beating on the
deck with his heavy bamboo cane, watching
with his stiff-necked bulletty-head two charming
sisters, who sat coquetting and winning
hearts not many feet off. Every wave of
their shining black fans fanned some lover's
flame—every quick furl of them let in the
sunshine of their eyes, like pulling up
blinds, on some happy one of their retinue.
Those little black hooks of side curls had
hooked many a heart, I was sure; and I
myself began to feel I had such a thing about
me. I heard a quiet, chuckling, good-natured
laugh behind me, and saw sitting on the low
gunwale of the vessel, a real Majo—a pure
Andalusian buck of the first water: laced
jacket, round turban cap, leather greaves,
javelin-stick, cigarette and all. He was resting
his arm on a pink hat-box, and watching the
two beautiful sisters with the almond eyes.

"Jeweller's daughters, for they have
diamond eyes," he said, in a quick, merry voice,
at the same time handing me his open
cigar-case, the Spaniard's mode of entering
into conversation and introducing himself.
He saw I was amused by his proverb, and
that I was a foreigner. What a curious feeling
it is, being a foreigner! Spanker used to