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166 DAYS IN THE SUN
others are waiting for us up in the village. They con-
duct us to the inn where a dinner is served for us: pork
in tomato-sauce, fried eggs and bacon-sausage.
At dinner, the cottagers talk to us. One of them
tells how he fared before he tilled his own soil. He
was working for a rather wealthy tenant-farmer down
in the Vega, at a daily wage of about fifteen cents, on
which he was supposed to support his wife and six
children. After the day’s work was over, he would
walk every day the seven miles or so to Granada to
beg until midnight on a street-corner of the Corso. In
this way he would acquire some fifteen cents more, and
this sufficed to nourish his family. But he had not
much time left over for sleep, and his nocturnal walk
of fifteen miles went into his legs. One night he
found his place taken by another beggar, who had a
woolen blanket wrapped around his head as a protec-
tion from the cold. In his anger he went for the man
and tore the blanket from his head, to discover it was
his own brother who had heard tidings of the fifteen
cents a night and had tried to cheat him out of them.
He never went to Granada again, in order that he
might run no risk of encountering his employer; but he
lost his job all the same.
“Things like this make people revolutionary,” said
Don Louis fiercely, gesticulating with his white ring-
encircled fingers. “I was in Madrid last week. What
an accumulation of wealth is found there, concentrated
in a few hands; and what a boundless poverty among
the great masses of the people! Society cannot but
collapse under this monstrous injustice that cries to
heaven. We shall soon have the revolution.”
He looked reassuringly at each one in turn and they
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