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A MORNING’S JOURNEY IQI
could be as polite as a Spaniard, and their faces re-
laxed a little. They called me now by the title of
Excelencia, now by that of Compañero (comrade),
and talked to me on every possible subject. They
asked whether it-was possible that I was from Old
Castile, which is a very cold country far to the north,
and shook their heads when I told them I came from
a country that was even colder than that. They
politely declined to empty a glass with me; but when
I insisted, they put their lips to my glass and wished
me good health. It is a sacred duty to pronounce such
invitations, but it is bad form to accept them, par-
ticularly from a stranger.
Not one of them had heard of Denmark, not even
by name. A few of them had heard of a country
called France, and one of them mentioned Arabia,
“where the sun does not go down for half a year.”
He glanced in my direction, for corroboration, and I
nodded, because to contradict them would mean to
lose all the favor you had gained among these people,
who have the habit of saying anything that comes into
their minds. They pointed to one of their number,
who had visited Murciar, a city on the Mediterranean
coast, and this man, turning to me, told me there was
nothing he would so much like to do as to travel and
become familiar with thé world and its peoples. He
said, “the whole world!” How Spanish this is! How
well it accords with their childlike, even their grandilo-
quent conceptions. To see another city is equivalent
to seeing “the whole world.” If a thing occurs to you
twice, it has happened all over the world. Spain is the
best country in the whole world, the coldest country in
the whole world, the hottest country in the whole
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