Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard and sinewy constitution, burned by the sun and inured by the cold, a sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity, tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting irony--_socarronería_, a racy word full of racy character--is the classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour, sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco in _Don Quixote_ and of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus. His slowness is matched by his tenacity, qualities that have an intimate association. His reaction-interval, as the psycho-physiologists would express it, is long; it takes him a considerable time to realize an impression or an idea, but once he has grasped it he does not readily relinquish it, does not in fact relinquish it until another has impinged upon it and driven it out. The slowness and tenacity of his impressions would appear to be due to the lack of an environing and unifying nimbus, blending them into a conjunctive whole; they do not merge into one another by subtle gradations, but each one disappears completely before the next takes its place. They seem to follow one another like the succession of uniform and monotonous tones in the landscape of his country, sharp edge against sharp edge. Go with him into his house. On the front wall the violent contrast of strident blue paint against a snow-white background exposed to the full blaze of the sun is almost painful to the eye. Sit down to table with him and partake of his simple dinner, prepared without much culinary art, accompanied only by keen and fiery condiments, a meal that is at once both frugal and violent, providing the palate with sharp-edged sensations. After the dinner, if the day chances to be a holiday, you will witness a dance, a dance slow and uniform, danced to the monotonous beat of drum or tambourine, a series of stabbing sounds that strike upon the ear like blows. And you will hear songs, wailing and monotonous, full of long-drawn-out notes, songs of the steppes, with the rhythm of the dragging labour of the plough in them. They testify to an ear that is incapable of appreciating the finer gradations of cadences and semi-tones.