I heard one man, an artisan, say with a shrug of his shoulders that he was going because he might as well be shot in action as shot for a deserter at home, and I saw another fling himself flat on the platform when the train came in, howling that “he was afraid of being killed and didn’t want to go to the war.” The first was a professed republican; the second, as the bystanders promptly informed me, was “drunk, as usual.” Very likely there were other cases of the same kind, but they were certainly exceptional. I made it my business to travel as much as I could at that time, on purpose to observe the people, for, knowing the Spanish peasant, I did not believe the tales current in the foreign Press of his cowardly and mutinous conduct, and I wished to see for myself how he behaved. I saw no such disgraceful exhibitions as were described by English and French journalists. The conversations that I overheard were very naïve: not at all the talk of a rebellious people, notwithstanding the tales of suffering in Cuba and in the Carlist wars which balked so large in the popular imagination. “My son! my son!” wailed one woman. “They will kill thee! I shall never see thee again!” “Hush, mother!” answered the young man. “Rest assured that if they do kill me I shall have killed plenty of them first.” “Why will they not let us women go too!” cried another mother. “We could kill all the _Moras_ [female Moors] and then they would bring no more little Moors into the world to be the ruin of Spain.” It was curious to observe how the eternal race-hatred came out at the very name of Moor--the tradition of the long contest between Christian and Moslem. The Moors of Morocco cannot be held to have inflicted any serious injury on the nation for many centuries past, yet such is the force of ancient tradition among the peasantry that the very name of _Moro_ calls forth the cry, “They are the ruin of Spain,” and if you ask for an explanation you will be told that “The Moors are always pressing upon us and trying to take our country from us.” One pathetic yet humorous incident was related by the Infanta Doña Paz (aunt to Don Alfonso) in a letter which she wrote to the Press about this time, exhorting her fellow-countrywomen to have patience and be of good courage. Describing her experiences of the patriotism of the men and the devotion of the women, she told how a poor mother, learning that her son was ordered to report himself for service, followed him from village to village, as he pursued his avocation of pedlar, carrying his regimental trousers, which had been put away in the family clothes-chest. When she found him at last, there was barely time for him to catch the appointed train, and the two hurried together to the station with the trousers flapping like a flag as they ran.