LIFE IN SPAIN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1865, 19 August 1887, Page 31

LIFE IN SPAIN.

A Spanish DinnerI stayed at an excellent French hotel in Madrid, but I gov tired of the French table d'hote. I wanted to eat as the Spaniards eat. One evening I persuaded a Spanish gentleman to take me to a real Spanish middleclass restaurant, and let me taste the fare of the country. The Spanish are a frugal and moderate race. Two or three dishes and dessert— that is their dinner. There is no long bill of fare as among the Fiench. The restaurant was a quiet room on the ground floor of the modest-looking house. There were one or two families and several single gentlemen dining. The women wore handkerchiefs on their heads and shawls over their shoulders. People dropped in, had a soup and a dish of meat, an orange and some nuts, and went away satisfied. Our bill of fare was more extravagant, but it created a sensation. The landlord and all the- waiters came in turns to look at the extraordinary Englishmen who had such gigantic appetites. Here is the exact menu. We began with olives and pickled pimientos and guindelias and chilis. These were the hors d'eeuvres. Then cigarettes. Then we had an ordinary thin soup, followed by cigarettes ; and then came the great national dish, called cocido. If you have a good dish of cocido (pronounced cothido, because of the Spanish lisp given to the c before certain vowels) you have a good deal for your dinner. It is a savoury stew of chicken, potatoes, sausage, bacon, and white beans, all boiled up with pieces of beef. In most Spanish families this is the everyday dish. Of course (he poorer classes have to leave out some of the ingredients, except on festive occasions. In Andalusia the peasants will sit round' a huge panful of their version of this article. It is made according to their means, and often vegetables are plentiful, but the nieces of meat few and far between, and each man ladles it out by spoonfuls into his mouth. Plates are dispensed with. The foreigner who is suddenly confronted with a huge dish of cocido and politely requested to help himself is in some difficulty. He takes a spoonful at hazard. The waiter still stands at his elbow. "The senor has only taken beans." Again you make a dash with the .spoon and secure something else. The waiter stares, but does not move away. " The sonor has only taken sausage." The senor, confused, requests the waiter to assist him ; and then the process, though slow, is interesting. A spoonful of beans on the plato ; then, selected with the greatest care, a piece of chicken ; then a patient search for a slice of sausage buried under a mound of cabbage ; then the cabbage itself ; then a minute devoted to a voyage of discovery in search of the nicest piece of beef ; then an exploration in search of a succulent morsel of bacon ; then a spoonful of the potatoes ; and then, over all, an extra spoonful of the beautiful gravy. I timed my waiter, and he took six minutes and a half to help mo to cocido. When the dish passes clown a table d'hote it takes about an hour to go round. It is for this reason that the Spaniards help themselves all together at the same time from the common dish. Travelling and its Dangers. I spent a pleasani week in Madrid, and I then went on to Seville. On three days a week there is an express train which does the journey of 350 miles in 15 hours. This is fortunate ; because the ordinary trains take 24, and even this is fast in comparison with the trains on less frequented lines. The express journey was not without its interesting features. We stopped now and again for 15 minutes and half an hour. When we stopped everybody got out of the train and went into the buffet, passengers, guards, enginedrivers, porters, and all. We all sat down together and ate and drank together, and then we all smoked cigarettes together round, the fire. When it was time to start, we got . up, stretched ourselves, and leisurely strolled back to the train, the guards and the enginedriver and the stoker being generally the last to turn out. It was very friendly and very nice, but as these stoppages of half an hour occur about every 20 minutes, the English traveller, unaccustomed to spend a day and a night in conversing with the enginedriver in a station waiting room, begins to get impatient. Our " civil guards," of course, went with us, their moustaches fiercely twisted and their rifles loaded. We still want this sort of protection on long railway journeys over lonely plains in Spain, because the brigands are not quite done away with yet. Only last year they stopped and robbed a train. The* way. in which the robbery is carried out is this. The brigands signal to the enginedriver to stop, and he does so, being generally " in " with the brigands. Then these gentlemen, called in Spanish Salteadores do eaminos, or road jumpers, approach the carriage, raise their hats to the passengers, and, in the most polite language, request them to give up their money and jewels. The yuardias civiles are stopped from firing at the robbers by the affrighted passengers, as the rascals have previously explained that if they are fired at they will shoot at the passengers in return. The chief of the brigands last year addressed the passengers in these terms : — " Ladies and Gentlemen, — Please deliver up your money and valuables of every description. We do not wish to put you to the indignity of a search, but shall rely upon your honour. But as soon as you tell us you have given up everything we shall search one passenger of each class. If upon either w e find a single coin or a single valuable, we shall shoot one passenger in each compartment. Ladies and gentlemen, do not hurry yourselves. Our time is yours." You can toagine that under these circumstances there is very little kept back. The passengers beg and pray of each other to conceal nothing. As soon as a complete surrender has been made, the brigands raise their hats again and bid the passengers farewell in these words, Vaya ustcdes can Dios — May you go with God— and as the train tooves off they add, with beautiful and simple P le ty, " and may we all meet again some day l i God's big parlour." SeriUe. (tf tvj 6 countr y aU around Seville is a garden or .kden. The orange trees, the palm trees, j^d the almond tree.s are everywhere. The wages are the prickly pear and the cactus.

The landscape is African in its luxuriance, and the golden sunshine floods the land with glory. But the roads ! O, ye gods, the roaris ! They ought to be impossible roads ; but we drove over them. They are in ruts a foot deep ; they are in holes in which a man might hide himself. They have uot been swept for centuries. The mud that was in heaps iri the days of the Moors remains in heaps .still. The dogs and cats who died by the roadside in the days of the Moors have not'yefc been buried. Once when I was in Seville it rained all night. The next day we drove through a sea of liquid mud. Even the roadways in front of the palaces of the rich are in great holes and full of ponds. Carriages break down, horses break their legs, visitors disappear down holes in the roadway. The devillians regret the circumstances ; they repair the carriages, buy new horses, make new friends, but they never repair the road. Some day the only way of getting about Seville will be by baloon. liven now it is the safest way. So much has been done for Seville by the past Moors ; the present burgesses might at least keep the roads in repair. The Guadal quiver I Another of my lost illusions. Poets have sung it from a distance — the poet who walks upon its bank holds his nose. The Guadalquiver, out of the poetry books and the songs and the romances, is a commonplace, dirty stream, about as romantic as the Thames at Barking creek, and not so clean. It is the people and the patios and the climate that make Seville, and the Santa Sermana — the Holy Week ! — that brings thousands and thousands of people to Seville. It is a week of magnificent processions — a week of such pomp and circumstance and magnificence and show as to be indescribable. All the winter long people come to Seville because it is said to be a beautiful place. During the month of the Santa Sermana they cram into Seville to see a sight which no other town in the world can show.

Disenchantment.

I have left myself no space to deal in detail with Seville this week, but next Sunday I shall tell you about my adventures with the 6500 young ladies of the worldfamed cigar and cigarette factoiy of Seville. If you have seen the opera of " Carmen," you will know how pretty they are, and how nicely they dress. I shall also tell you of the extraordinary things I saw in the cemetery, and in the asylum of the poor, and in the 500 gardens of the Alcazar,, and in the house of Pontius Pilate. That is to say, unless the wretched organ grinder under my window drives me mad and puts everything out of my head. He is still at it, although it is past midnight. It is too shameful. I am within a stone's throw of the Alhambra, the last stronghold of the Moors. I gaze from my window at the snow-clad summits of the Sierra Nevada, dusky gi tanas and gipsy chiefs have danced and sung for me only a short hour ago, my whole being is raturated with the romance of tho most romantic spot in Europe ; and this wretched organ grinder spoils everything by [.laying London music hall tunes six times o\or, and theti going a Tew doors off and beginning them all over again. They mo merciful to assassins in this country. I wonder how much it would cost me to cost me to square the authorities if I assassinated that organ grinder. I have bought a navaja (a murderous Spanish knife) as a present for "Pendragon." Perhaps he will value it still more if he can tell everybody that it is the identical weapon with which a murder was committed by " Dagonet." — " Dagonet," in the Referee.