Resignation and Sausages 



tall, high-featured, stately dame, in a small kitchen com- 

 pletely hung with festoons of red sausages, depending there 

 to dry for the Vitoria market to-morrow morning. 



We sat among the sausages smoking and trying to make 

 the best of our fate, and conversing with our venerable 

 hostess, while she dressed our supper. She was a respect- 

 able, motherly old lady, with a dignified gravity of manner, 

 very different from the ordinary type of shrill, gossiping, 

 slatternly posaderas in Spain at large. She and her 

 daughters talked usually in Basque to one another, though 

 they could all speak Spanish after a fashion. 



She told us that her husband had been killed in the 

 troubles, and she herself had been in prison five years for 

 oponion {oposicion) to Christina, although she had no 

 political preference for one party over another, but false 

 witnesses had been her ruin. She was now poorer than she 

 had been in her youth, and was obliged to keep a casa de 

 huespedes for her livelihood, which she eked out with keeping 

 pigs. I dare say, if we had not found the kitchen full of 

 sausages, we should have found the stable full of swine. 



By this time one of the daughters came up to say our 

 room was ready, and our landlady recommended us to have 

 supper served there. We went down and found a very 

 decent bedroom, with clean and comfortable beds ; so that, 

 after all, we had had our lesson of Biscayan manners, and 

 not suffered so much inconvenience as we might have 

 expected. 



From Salinas, the road winds through fertile and populous 

 valleys, among large green mountains, by the side of a 

 swift and copious river. On the bank, a graven stone set 

 forth that here a youth of happiest promise, the only pride 

 of now childless parents, had been drowned while fishing ; 

 from which we argued there must be fish in the stream ; 



387 BB 



