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30 DAYS IN THE SUN
you because you are a stranger, but to be amused them-
selves. The stranger is the fuse that kindles pleas-
ure. Why should this displease him? Among them-
selves no one is more pleased than he who serves as
the butt of the joke.
When a city has many vaudeville theaters, you may
be sure that city has little real merriment. The two
hundred thousand inhabitants of Seville have no such
theaters and do not need them. ‘Their laughter is so
easily aroused that it can be started with no cause at
all. Introspection is a stranger to them. Ibsen,
Björnsen, are regarded in Seville simply as comic
writers who manage to keep a straight face while mak-
ing sport of northern European pompousness and
hypocrisy.
Seville is the home of bulls, bullfights, and bull-
fighters; the city of dancing, of fans, and of castanets.
Late in the evening you can pick your way through the
narrow streets, lured on by tinkling music, and land,
not in a dance hall, but in a church with the priest
standing before the altar celebrating mass, assisted by
a solemn male choir. Whenever the chorus has sung
a few stanzas in its dismal Miserere, there is a spas-
modic interlude of castanets, tambourines, cymbals and
triangles, sounding a dance of such seductive savage-
ness as to dispel all piety and draw sparks from the
eyes of the most demure madonnas. Then once more
pious meditation possesses the wide spaces of the
church, evoked by gloomy strophes, only to yield again
in its turn, like an alternating shower-bath of flesh and
spirit.
We had long been eager for an opportunity to wit-
ness Sevillian dances. The opportunity finally came.
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