SPAIN.
"SUPPOSE and suppose I go to sleep again; what should I like to see
next? A sunny place, I think, where there is sea to look at. Shall it be
Spain, and shall it be among the poor people? Well, I think I should
like to be where there is a little lady girl. I hope they are not all as
lazy and conceited as the Chinese and the Turk."
So Lucy awoke in a large cool room with a marble floor and heavy
curtains, but with little furniture except one table, and a row of
chairs ranged along the wall. It had two windows, one looking out into
a garden,--such a garden!--orange-trees with shining leaves and green
and golden fruit and white flowers, and jasmines, and great lilies
standing round about a marble court, in the midst of which was a basin
of red marble, where a fountain was playing, making a delicious
splashing; and out beyond these sparkled in the sun the loveliest and
most delicious of blue seas--the same blue sea, indeed, that Lucy had
seen in her Italian visit.
That window was empty; but the other, which looked out into the street,
had cushions laid on the sill, an open-work stone ledge beyond, and
little looking-glasses on either side; and leaning over this sill there
was seated a little maiden in a white frock, but with a black lace veil
fastened by a rose into her jet-black hair, and the daintiest,
prettiest-shaped little feet imaginable in white satin shoes, which
could be plainly seen as she knelt on the window-seat.
"What are you looking at?" asked Lucy, coming to her side.
[Illustration: "See now," cried the Spaniard, "stand there. Ah! have you
no castanets?"
_Page 110._]
"I'm watching for the procession. Then I shall go to church with Mamma.
Look! That way we shall see it come; these two mirrors reflect
everything up and down the street."
"Are you dressed for church?" asked Lucy. "You have no hat on."
"Where does your grace come from not to know that a mantilla is what is
fit for church? Mamma is being dressed in her black silk and her black
mantilla."
"And your shoes?"
"I could not wear great, coarse, hard shoes," said the little Dona Ines;
"it would spoil my feet. Ah! I shall have time to show the Senorita what
I can do. Can your grace dance?"
"I danced with Uncle Joe at our last Christmas party," said Lucy, with
great dignity.
"See now," cried the Spaniard; "stand there. Ah! have you no castanets?"
and she quickly took out two very small ivory shells or bowls, each pair
fastened together by a loop, through which she passed her thumb so that
the little spoons hung on her palm, and she could snap them together
with her fingers.
Then she began to dance round Lucy in the most graceful swimming way,
now rising, now falling, and cracking her castanets together at
intervals. Lucy tried to do the same, but her limbs seemed like a wooden
doll's compared with the suppleness and ease of Ines. She made sharp
corners and angles, where the Spaniard floated so like a sea-bird that
it was like seeing her fly or float rather than merely dance, till at
last the very watching her rendered Lucy drowsy and dizzy, and as the
church bells began to ring, and the chant of the procession to sound,
she lost all sense of being in sunny Malaga, the home of grapes.