its haddocks, and Penzance for its pilchards;
to Chedder's rocky pass for its curdy cheese;
to the South Downs for their ortolans; to
Jersey for its conger-eel soup, and to
Whitstable for its pulpy oysters, delicious as
those that the old Roman used to call "the
Ears of Venus," and which were found in
the blue bay of Naples, the mirror of that
goddess.

The pomegranate salads of Spain I did
not taste, and much do I regret it; but I
must say that, though the red-cored pippy
fruit may throw a pleasant acid halo about the
shred lettuce luminous with golden oil, the
fruit itself is a most ugly and disappointing
thing in real life. I remembered how the
Arab poets used to liken the mouths of their
Oneizas and Leilahs, when their white teeth
showed between their vermilion lips, to the
seeds of a chapped pomegranate. Directly I
got into a Spanish market-place I ransacked
every stall for this precious vegetable, which
seemed to hide from me behind the fiery
orange-lobed love-apples and the pale green
chumbos, tight-rinded as vegetable marrows.
I searched over heaps of coarse yellow
melons cut into slices for sale. I rummaged
the livid, unwholesome, decomposed looking
cactus fruit.

The oranges were not then picked; but,
unconscious of Cheapside and the roar of the
London playhouse, hung green and sappy on
the quiet Spanish trees. That was August,
and they would not jaundice and be fit to
pick for their sea voyage till October. I
heard all about the chests with a thousand
balls of gold in each, and yet not worth to the
exporter more than thirty shillings; I shall
see them again in our London docks, unpacking
from sheathings of Catalonian paper and dry
maize husks. But what I looked for was the
Arab fruit—the apple of Granada. Then I
came to heaps of purple olives, green, brown,
and wine coloured, large as pigeons' eggs,
and horribly indigestible, grown for the "dura
ilia" of Sevillian peasants. These olive-trees
bear well in thirty years, while the orange in
twenty begins to deteriorate and produce
coarse fruit. But the vine, says a friend
who is beating the market coverts with me,
is of royal blood and special, and in all
its qualities, the older it is the better its
fruit; though, it must be confessed (he yields
this upon pressure) the scantier. He is
going on, as my eager eyes course over the
stalls, as to how Seville in March, when the
orange-flower blooms, smells like a tropical
jungle, the scent being thick and almost
painfully strong; and how the nuns make
sweetmeats and sweet-water of the
blossoms; and how a true Sevillian will not eat
an orange till March, when the new blossom
comes, nor even then after sunset, when
the fruit is thought noxious; and how in
the sea voyage the rind gets tough and the
freshness fades.

Some of this is heard by a fruit-seller, who,
weighing a melon in his hands, tips us a verse
of a Sevillian orange song:

"Take, my dearest, take this orange,
   With its fair and golden skin;
But do not cut it with a dagger,
    For my heart is hid within."

then, ceasing to sing, the sly trader passes,
his hand with juggler quickness over the
different compartments of his stall, repeating
the name of each fruit. I start as he touches
one very unpromising lot, which stands next to
the green figs, and cries, "Pomegranates of
the first excellence, Caballeros"—nasty earthy
round fruit, not unlike the hand-grenade, to
which they gave the name, with a rind like
an unpolished shell, or the half-baked crust
of a doughy meat pie. You split them, and
discover nothing but white bean-like seeds,
set in a red pulpy flesh of a pleasant sour
taste—so much for the metaphor of the Arab
poets. It must be a very burning country to
make one take much pleasure in so deceptive
and unsatisfying a fruit. What! can this be
the fruit of the red-blossomed tree, with the
glossy leaf? No; this is our old friend the
disappointing apple of Sodom, made so much
of by the poets as a symbol of whited
sepulchres.

And now as I have begun, capriciously
enough, with the dessert of the Spanish
dinner, let us discuss the figs, having first
scooped out the sour, red fleshy seeds of the
pomegranate, and thrown them on the dung-
hill of contempt, to use a true Oriental form
of speech. Now there are the green figs and
the purple figs. The green fig is a little,
shrivelled green bag of a fruit, looking like
the bladders from which the old artists
squeezed their colours. Eaten with the
early dew on it, it is a thing to remember:
and many a morning have I strolled down
the rough street leading to a Spanish market-
place, taking side-looks, as I passed, in at
morning masses, where the incense was
breaking out in gusts of ambrosial fragrance,
sweet as the meadows of asphodel, that
it was given to our blind poet to see and sing
of. There they are, like so many bloated
greengages, side by side with their darker
blooded Moorish kinsmen who wear the
royal purple—a purple a little ashy, and cold
as of dulled unpolished porphyry. But such
bags of cloying sweetness. For all that, you
soon fall from them satiated, and long for the
sour stimulus of a juicier and keener fruit.
As for the melons, they melt to golden
liquid directly your lips close on them,
and you bless the lush plains of Valencia,
where all the best melons of Spain come
from. The melon always seemed to me
a sort of lotos fruit, moulded out of
consolidated sunshine—iced sunshine—it is
endowed with a concentrated cool sweetness,
that makes a pine-apple a mere baked potato
beside it.

I always used to wonder, when I saw a