The Argosy — page 46: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

36 Letters from Majorca. eating fish, flesh or fowl. We accepted all in faith ; and for dessert, our hostess gave us lovely apples and grapes, newly dried figs, and freshly prepared Mallorcan almonds baked brown and crisp. We wandered out into the town in the darkness, admired the lights and shadows in the courts, the women at their wheels, idly gossiping away last moments before retiring. There was a moon. Such a moon! Round as a shield and glowing with liquid light, pale as a ghost, and silent as the dead. We lingered long about the plains, fascinated by this solemn silence and mystery, this light in darkness ; just sufficient to reveal all the expanse of country and give one a sense of intense loneliness. Very weird looked the windmills with their strange sails. The lights in the houses gradually went out; doors were closed and fastened; the town retired ; streets were deserted. Here and there a cloaked and shivering cavalier hastened along as if pursued by an enemy, for the night was fresh and chilly. We enjoyed it, but to these Mallorquins it no doubt felt a perishing atmosphere. Far down in a narrow street, we saw the solitary watchman, cloaked, lanterned, heavy of tread, sad voiced. Listening, I shud- dered ; fascinated, I followed. He perambulated the town, told the hour and the state of the night, and his voice was very much like that of the Palma watchmen, They all have a certain keynote, and formula and rhythm, which like the wild music of the country, is peculiar to themselves. Long may it remain so. We tracked him to the confines of the town, and saw him disappear amidst several windmills, not far from the railway sta- tion. What the windmills wanted with the hour and the night, we could not tell. They were not inhabited, and no houses were mear them. Within the town the streets were dark and unlighted, probably in honour of the moon. But some of them were so narrow that her soft beams did not penetrate, and they looked suspicious and unsafe. Not that anything is really unsafe in Mallorca. The people are honest, or are said to be so. Banditti are unknown, and for the rest, there is not much to steal, and no one worth murdering. We made our way vack to the hotel, ready for a good night’s rest, and expecting it. But the unexpected happens. To begin with, beneath our windows, all night long, there went on a shouting of men; a rolling of barrels, as if giants, having a game. at football, were playing with “a hundred balls instead of one. I , have not been able to discover the reason for this Bacchanalian Pan- demonium, or to understand why it should have gone on through all the dark hours of the night. In any other place, one might have thought these were the evil doings of smugglers, but here such things are impossible. This was not our worst enemy. We had other powers of dark- nas - — comicbooks.com