PAGE I. BROUGHT FORWARD 1 II. LOS PINGOS 11 III. FIDELITY 30 IV. “UNO DEI MILLE” 40 V. WITH THE NORTH-EAST WIND 51 VI. ELYSIUM 60 VII. HEREDITY 66 VIII. EL TANGO ARGENTINO 81 IX. IN A BACKWATER 97 X. HIPPOMORPHOUS 106 XI. MUDEJAR 120 XII. A MINOR PROPHET 130 XIII. EL MASGAD 146 XIV. FEAST DAY IN SANTA MARIA MAYOR 164 XV. BOPICUÁ 185 I BROUGHT FORWARD THE workshop in Parkhead was not inspiriting. From one week’s end to another, all throughout the year, life was the same, almost without an incident. In the long days of the Scotch summer the men walked cheerily to work, carrying their dinner in a little tin. In the dark winter mornings they tramped in the black fog, coughing and spitting, through the black mud of Glasgow streets, each with a woollen comforter, looking like a stocking, round his neck. Outside the dreary quarter of the town, its rows of dingy, smoke-grimed streets and the mean houses, the one outstanding feature was Parkhead Forge, with its tall chimneys belching smoke into the air all day, and flames by night. Its glowing furnaces, its giant hammers, its little railway trucks in which men ran the blocks of white-hot iron which poured in streams out of the furnaces, flamed like the mouth of hell. Inside the workshop the dusty atmosphere made a stranger cough on entering the door. The benches with the rows of aproned men all bending at their work, not standing upright, with their bare, hairy chests exposed, after the fashion of the Vulcans at the neighbouring forge, gave a half-air of domesticity to the close, stuffy room. A semi-sedentary life quickened their intellect; for where men work together they are bound to talk about the topics of the day, especially in Scotland, where every man is a born politician and a controversialist. At meal-times, when they ate their “piece” and drank their tea that they had carried with them in tin flasks, each one was certain to draw out a newspaper from the pocket of his coat, and, after studying it from the Births, Deaths, and Marriages, down to the editor’s address on the last page, fall a-disputing upon politics. “Man, a gran’ speech by Bonar Law aboot Home Rule. They Irish, set them up, what do they make siccan a din aboot? Ca’ ye it Home Rule? I juist ca’ it Rome Rule. A miserable, priest-ridden crew, the hale rick-ma-tick o’ them.”