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SUNLIGHT iat
of water, his tongue revels in the use of all the rich
and tender adjectives of his language. But he dwells
above all on the circumstance that water has no price
but gushes forth freely and extravagantly from the
ground—a gift of God for the poorest. On one of our
mountain tours in the environs of Granada I had occa-
sion to talk to a cottager, who, when we told him of
our voyages, burst out with the exclamation: “It must
be glorious to see so much of the world, and to taste
all the waters of the various places”; and a woman
from Granada who had gone to visit the mountain city
of Loja in order to be cured of a stomach trouble and
had drunk from Jos veinticinco canos (a spring whose
waters are made to flow from twenty-five tubes), as-
sured me that she could taste a distinct difference be-
tween the waters of the various pipes. At first she felt
bloated and her entrails were mortified, but after this
water had won the victory over the local waters, she
began to feel uncommonly well, and finally, after she
had drunk from all the pipes, it seemed to her as if
she had a slight intoxication as from wine. This
legendary delight in water has about it something that
is not so much native to this part of the country and
may have arisen rather in conditions in the Sahara, or
in Arabia.
This happy superiority to circumstances puts the
lower class on practically the same basis as the pos-
sessing class, imparting to the former, in its relations
to its betters, a feeling of self-dignity which one seeks
in vain elsewhere. In this ‘aristocratic’ country, it is
the most natural thing in the world for a proletarian
to stop a cabinet member or a nobleman and ask him
for a light—and get it. If a market-woman happens
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