exiled Indian race; partly an eastern incantation
for some Cybele or Isie ceremony. He
reminds me, with his staring eyes and outstretched
neck, of the demoniac boy in
Raphael's Transfiguration. He sits on the
farrier's lap, a sorry sight for cheerful
people's eyes. He helps in the low monotonous
burden of hand-clapping (palmeado),
the beating of feet and the palmeado, or
final chorus. On the whole, it is awful to
see him, for he writhes like a person possessed.

His big brother keeps looking on with a sort
of knavish pleasure, while some Leporello in
the corner sweeps the tinkling and wedded
strings with his hand, and beats the guitar-board
with his thumb. Another brother
who, though of royal Romany blood, looks
distressingly like a sweep—having a grimy,
mean, sordid face—stares dully at the opposite
wall, for he is blind. As for the sullen big
brother, his little, weazel, black bead eyes,
are always smiling out with hard suspicious
cunning from underneath his depressed and
bumpy brows. There they go, the whole
happy and ancient family, shuffling their feet
in time, beating with monotonous and unceasing
regularity their horny hands, sweeping
the guitar in rapid rasqueandos, flourishes,
or floreandos, and drum-like golpeandos. Ten
to one it is the barber of the street, Figaro
himself, who now sings. There is an intense
air of conviction about the whole group that
they are essential to the night's amusement;
and there is a twinkle of the eyes that
seems to say, "O ye Busné, how soon, if we
chose, could we clear every pocket, and slip
off to dear Macarena," the snug beggar's
quarter.

As for Pepe Blanco, he, in his loose, un-buttoned
jacket and staff of office, is preteruaturally
busy. He bows to me, he jokes
with the gipsies, he condescends to Rose and
the guitar; he seems a shrewd, busy, rather
pompous man, who presumes on old saltatorial
skill.

And where are the performers? O, here
they come. That black-browed, hard beauty,
is Pepe Blanco's eldest daughter (and
manager, too, I should think). Her short,
boufféed balloon dress is striped horizontally,
with red and blue; she struts in it, with toes
out like a reduced Lady Macbeth, She
shines with bugles and tinsel bobs. She is
all black bushy dots, as if she had adorned
herself with stubbly tufts, made of the beards
of dead lovers. She is a little painted;
her blush would be natural were it not
perpetual, and were there not an unfortunate
tell-tale spot of whitewash in the
midst of that hard red that ascends to her
lower eyelid. I should not like to say her
eyelids were not darkened, but certainly
her black hair is wet with liquid grease.
On her stiff white hands are several rings
set with sparkling rubies from the Philippine
islands: her large feet twinkle in white
satin slippers, and her leg is a miracle of
robust shapeliness. Her poses are masculine
and abrupt, her recoil has the flexibility
of steel. Her younger sister is a much
prettier daughter of Eve. She is charming
in pink silk and black lace, a piquant mixture
of colours, and her complexion, though
of the unhealthy-looking pale olive, is
crystal clear, though no flash of rosy red
glance across her cheek, be she pleased,
surprised, or angry. She waves a glittering
sceptre of a fan, and looks on everything
with that jaded, lifeless, mechanical look
peculiar to public performers. Her fat
father's jokes she takes as mere professional
matters of course: she knows the peculiar
joke for each peculiar hour. Sometimes she
gives a rueful smile at her sister, or oftener
still, a sickly ogle, which is the mere result
of theatrical habit. This is a sorry life,
Dolores. This is poor work compared with
Perea Nina, in her gilded rooms; or that
favourite of Seville, La Campanila,—the
daughter of the keeper of the Giralda bell-tower.
It puts one out of patience, Dolores,
does it not, to think of dancing before a set
of clerks and tourists. What does Lady
Macbeth think. Saint Apollonia, how like a
Jezebel she looks, as she stretches her feet
or crosses them softly as if they had on
Cinderella's glass slippers, one over the other.
The guitar gets more like a tin-kettle than
ever. More running up and down the buzzing
rigging of the strings, more rat-tat of
the castanets, as if the room were full of
cats, with walnut-shells tied to their feet.

I fell into a musing eulogy of the dance.
I thought with gratitude of how it brings
lovers together, and welds firmer love's half-forged
chains: how it quickens the blood of
society; how it makes the poor for a time
happy as the rich, and how it makes the
rich natural for a time as the poor.

"You seem as if you was going to sleep,
gentleman," says Rose.

"No, no, not at all," says I, crying " Encore!"
out of place, to show I was alert,
and not to be caught.

Then began the Bolero, the Jezebel and
Pepe Blanco's assistant joining: the painted
Jezebel, stately in her parti-coloured dress,
her waist tight and buckramed with a breast-plate
of bugles, her white satin slippers twinkling
like flying ermines over a Siberian plain
her strong blanched arms swaying round
head in perfect and harmonious balance. The
assistant is a leopard sort of Pierrot, who
wears a brown cloth jacket, a dark red sash,
and light canvas shoes, which, intended to
checkmate the heat, look like slippers, and
give him an undress, reckless air. He is one
of those thin oval-faced young old men one
sees in Spain, with dry brown hair, and no beard
or moustachios. He may be a barber, but at
all events he has a serious air of intense devotion
to his amusement, which savours of
chivalry, and is amusing. I, who go everywhere