Familiar Spanish Travels | Page 6

and no doubt it was their owners
whom we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into
the carts drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but
pulled by a band drawn over their foreheads under their horns, and they
had the air of not liking the arrangement; though, for the matter of that,
I have never seen oxen that seemed to like being yoked.
When we came down to dinner we found the tables fairly full of belated
visitors, who presently proved tourists flying south like ourselves. The
dinner was good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for an
average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive rate which you
must double for as good accommodation in our States. Let no one, I say,
fear the rank cookery so much imagined of the Peninsula, the oil, the
pepper, the kid and the like strange meats; as in all other countries of
Europe, even England itself, there is a local version, a general
convention of the French cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere,
and oftener superabundant than subabundant. The plain water is
generally good, With an American edge of freshness; but if you will
not trust it (we had to learn to trust it) there are agreeable Spanish
mineral waters, as well as the Apollinaris, the St. Galmier, and the
Perrier of other civilizations, to be had for the asking, at rather greater
cost than the good native wines, often included in the inclusive rate.
Besides this convention of the French cuisine there is almost
everywhere a convention of the English language in some one of the

waiters. You must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate
wants, but in this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had even a wider
range with the English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish
waiter, with a fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I
began to flounder in the language which I had read so much and spoken
so little or none. He had been a year in London, he said, and he took us
for English, though, now he came to notice it, he perceived we were
Americans because we spoke "quicklier" than the English. We did not
protest; it was the mildest criticism of our national accent which we
were destined to get from English-speaking Spaniards before they
found we were not the English we did not wish to be taken for. After
dinner we asked for a fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared
there was no fuel; and, though the hostess denied this and promised us
a fire the next night, she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would
not have it. The cold abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian,
but the storm (which had hummed and whistled theatrically at our
windows) broke during the first night, and the day followed with
several intervals of sunshine, which bathed us in a glowing-expectation
of overtaking the fugitive summer farther south.

IV
In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red
Basque cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at
something above the legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in
San Sebastian unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old
and new, with their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find
glooming and glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of
like things. We got from them the sense of that architectural and
sculptural richness which the interior of no Spanish church ever failed
measurably to give; but what their historical associations were I will
not offer to say. The associations of San Sebastian with the past are in
all things vague, at least for me. She was indeed taken from the French
by the English under Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of
older, if not unhappier farther-off days and battles longer ago her
history as I know it seems to know little. It knows of savage and

merciless battles between the partisans of Don Carlos and those of
Queen Isabella so few decades since as not to be the stuff of mere
pathos yet, and I am not able to blink the fact that my beloved Basques
fought on the wrong side, when they need not have fought at all. Why
they were Carlists they could perhaps no more say than I could. The
monumental historic fact is that the Basques have been where they are
immeasurably beyond the memories of other men; what the scope of
their own memories is one could perhaps confidently say only in
Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in the nature