through Andalucia, looking for Don
Quixote, thought I had a descendant of him
here; but no, his name is José-Maria, and
he is waiter at the café next door, which
bears the great name of Julius Cæsar;
though Julius Cæsar certainly never took
coffee next door. He is a small thin man,
with no great gift of muscle, is José-Maria, the
lithe waiter; but how he leaps and bounds
and comes down, as if through the ceiling,
like mercury, on the top of his elastic toes!
He is this moment seated next the guitar,
discussing a dance tune. Now he springs
forward, meets the smiling Jezebel, and seems
determined to dance her down. Their hands
do not meet, but they turn and encircle, and
dos à dos, each with the clicking castanets,
which are answered by half a dozen other
pairs scattered through the room. Even
phlegmatic Pepe Blanco rattles a pair, and
so does a little muslined-out sister of Jezebel,
whose name is Lola. The gipsies work on
with their droning chant and sleepy, unceasing
hand-clapping, and the guitar tinkles
and chimes, in threading the pattern of the
dance. Now they end suddenly, with a clash
of the castanets, which sounds like a smashing
of targets, and everybody laughs at the
vivacious vigour and surprise of the ending,
which leaves the dancers standing, like
statues.

Now they dash off again, as if disdaining
and ashamed of rest; José performing miraculous
feats of skill, turning as if his back
was India rubber, and his feet spring-heeled.
Herodias-Jezebel is quite a match for him,
and stands up to him manfully, her great
coloured dress swaying and tossing like
a dahlia in a high wind. The canvas-slippered
men with the black turban caps,
fan themselves, as if seeing other people red-hot
made them red-hot, too. They shout
some sort of Brava and Ancora and Bis,
that sound like Se repeta. They hark on the
tiring dancers with encouraging Jaleos, such
as the contrabandistas use to their flagging
horses. José flings about his legs as if he
were a Fantoccini, ties himself in knots,
springs up in the air, and comes down in
a step that instantly wheels him on round
Jezebel; he pursues her, she flies, wounding
him, Parthian like, with her great gig-lamps
of eyes. She wheedles him with her wanton
and swaying arms: now she follows him, he
turns and bends to kiss her; now she again
flies, and so winds the cat's cradle of the
dance, that the castanets emphasise and punctuate,
like the rattle of so much summer hail.
The horny, dry click-click goes on in a loud
cricketing as of a wood pecker's tapping, cheery,
shrill, and loud. A man next me, with black
velvet embroidery about his jacket sleeves,
and with brass tags down the front of it, can
hardly keep his feet still, so suggestive and
stimulating is the sound of castanets to the
Spanish ear. It is as a trumpet to a soldier,
or a gun-fire to a sailor. How the gipsy
girl laughs and shows her great white horse
teeth! How the possessed boy screams!
How the big brother works away at the
suffering guitar, as Jezebel and José-Maria
see-saw at the Cadiz Cachuca, with its merry
grasshopper accompaniment. Is not this
better to Englishmen than the dull rites
of a quadrille, or the giddy, but unvarying
waltz of Germany? "What a pity the
old Zarabanda, that James the Second's
court indulged in, before the vulgar romp
of the pillow dance set all in confusion,
is now forgotten, except by retentive yellow
old music-books: but still we have
the Bolero and the Fandango, with their
staccato steps, and their abrupt, clashing
pauses. As for the Bolero, it is a complete
dancing-duel,—graceful and agile as the
gambols of leopards. How beautifully the
hands seem to sympathise and join in the
dance, compared with our English performances,
where hands seem mistakes and
superfluities intended to hamper and embarrass
shy people! How the feet run,
and match, and pair, as if they had separate
wills to the joined and bending bodies!
Beautiful expressions of superabundant joy
and youth, hope and fervour; beautiful
similitude and pantomime of love; free,
healthy, agile exercise, which really is dancing,
and not walking to pattern. No wonder,
then, that as the castanets cease to
shake, and the hard dry hands to beat, the
whole company of Pepe Blanco burst out
with universal cries of "Orza! orzazas,
punalada!" Jezebel strutting to her seat with
toes rigidly out, and José-Maria sitting down,
and lighting a cigarette, with not a hair turned.
What wonder that since Martial's time Spain
has supplied the world with dancers

Make way for the gipsy-girl, who is going to
show us how the Egyptian ghawasses and
the Hindoo nautch-girls dance. She will
dance the Romalis, which is the dance which
Tiberius may have seen, and which no one
but a gipsy dances in Spain. She will
dance it to the old oriental music of hand-clapping,
and to an old religious eastern
tune, low and melancholy,—diatonic, not
chromatic, and full of sudden pauses, which
are strange and startling. It will be sung in
unison, and will have a chorus, in which
every one will join. Ford, the great authority
in Spain, says these tunes are relics of the old
Greek and Phoenician music. Even their
guitar, of that strange calabash shape, is
Moorish; it is worn and played just as it
was four thousand years ago, before King
Wilkinson came to Egypt and unpotted the
Pharaohs.

The dancing-girl is, to tell the whole truth,
not romantic; no antelope eyes; no black
torrents of overflowing hair; no sweeping
fringe of eyelash; no serpentine waist; no
fairy feet; no moonlight vioce. No. She is
rather like a sailor's wife at Wapping. She
has ropy black hair, drawn back behind her