Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with AdditionsStephen, Leslie
History
Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with Additions
Stephen, Leslie
English literature -- History and criticism
seriously, indulges in the proper reflections, and gets into the
regulation difficulty involving an appeal to the British minister.
But it soon appears that his Protestant zeal is somehow mixed up
with a passion for strange wanderings in the queerest of company. To
him Spain is not the land of staunch Catholicism, or of Cervantes,
or of Velasquez, and still less a country of historic or political
interest. Its attraction is in the picturesque outcasts who find ample
roaming-ground in its wilder regions. He regards them, it is true, as
occasional subjects for a little proselytism. He tells us how he once
delivered a moving address to the gipsies in their own language to his
most promising congregation. When he had finished he looked up and
found himself the centre of all eyes, each pair contorted by a hideous
squint, rivalling each other in frightfulness; and the performance,
which he seems to have thoroughly appreciated, pretty well expressed
the gipsy view of his missionary enterprise. But they delighted to
welcome him in his other character as one of themselves, and yet as
dropping amongst them from the hostile world outside. And, certainly,
no one not thoroughly at home with gipsy ways, gipsy modes of thought,
to whom it comes quite naturally to put up in a den of cutthroats,
or to enter the field of his missionary enterprise in company with
a professional brigand travelling on business, could have given us
so singular a glimpse of the most picturesque elements of a strange
country. Your respectable compiler of handbooks might travel for years
in the same districts all unconscious that passing vagabonds were so
fertile in romance. The freemasonry which exists amongst the class
lying outside the pale of respectability enables Borrow to fall in
with adventures full of mysterious fascination. He passes through
forests at night, and his horse suddenly stops and trembles, whilst he
hears heavy footsteps and rustling branches, and some heavy body is
apparently dragged across the road by panting but invisible bearers.
He enters a shadowy pass, and is met by a man with a face streaming
with blood, who implores him not to go forwards into the hands of a
band of robbers; and Borrow is too sleepy and indifferent to stop, and
jogs on in safety without meeting the knife which he half expected.
'It was not so written,' he says, with the genuine fatalism of your
hand-to-mouth Bohemian. He crosses a wild moor with a half-witted
guide, who suddenly deserts him at a little tavern. After a wild
gallop on a pony, apparently half-witted also, he at last rejoins the
guide resting by a fountain. This gentleman condescends to explain
that he is in the habit of bolting after a couple of glasses, and
never stops till he comes to running water. The congenial pair lose
themselves at nightfall, and the guide observes that if they should
meet the Estadéa, which are spirits of the dead riding with candle in
their hands—a phenomenon happily rare in this region—he shall 'run
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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