Talking of shoes brings us back to the alpagata. A man will be working at a table like a butcher's block. Deftly he cuts the rope, bending it around an iron peg into the shape of the sole, then with a long awl he pierces it through and through, sewing it with great rapidity, and almost hey presto! as it were, a pair of soles are finished. Women who sit almost on the edge of the street, chattering and gossiping--often with the passers-by--are making the uppers of stout canvas. They spring from work to serve you with a gracious kindliness, and seeing that you are English they probably with the same gracious kindliness clap an extra fifty centimos on to the price. If only we had such an alpagata shop in London what a rush there would be to purchase.
Your old alpagatas you leave behind you. What happens to them is to us a mystery. Old boots are the nuisance of the London dust heaps, the terror of the errant mongrel. Yorick, who, Sam Weller assures us, is the only person who has ever seen a dead donkey, may also in his travels have seen an extinct alpagata, but his "Sentimental Journey" is unfinished and we shall never know.
Along cool colonnades of raw-coloured brick, up a staircase arched with concrete, and out through a sort of concrete culvert which spouted humanity, we came into the huge round amphitheatre of the bullring. Owing to Spanish dilatoriness, we were later than we had intended, and in consequence were unable to get seats within the coveted shadow which lay over half the great enclosure; but, thank goodness, the sky was mottled with clouds which tempered both the heat and the glare of the Spanish afternoon. We were in the cheapest seats, having disdained to go skywards into the boxes, for we had come to taste the full flavour of an average bullfight as a popular spectacle, and we wished it as pure as possible. So we had bought purple tickets for two pesetas and a white one for me at half price; at the same time repelling the persistence of a feminine hawker, who pressed upon us large flabby looking paper bags of mysterious content which we imagined to be some form of refreshment. The seats of the bullring were of flat stone rising tier upon tier, and we chose our places low down to get a good view, yet as near as possible to the slowly creeping shadow; only one row of stone seats and two rows of chairs of iron lattice separated us from the arena itself. The chairs were empty, so I asked Luis if they were reserved for some special purpose. "No," he answered, "but the bull may leap out of the ring. Those chairs would entangle him, but it is uncomfortable if you happen to be sitting there, so they are not very popular." As the edge of the arena was guarded by a palisade of stout planking about five feet high, through which were cut narrow gaps--bolt-holes--for the toreadors, and the seats were separated from this palisade by a passage some six feet wide, the lowest seats being set some ten feet above the floor, I felt that the risk of finding an enraged bull in one's lap was rather remote.