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yet the middle of January. Malaga has a climate of the sort for which we search in vain up and down the Riviera.

We seated ourselves on the ground, and the little goatherd stood gazing at us

through the cork forests and then swung down through the barren pass. of the Chorra out into the fertile plain of Guadalmedina-rich lands full of vineyards and olive and orange groves.

"But why are you poor? With such

"Do you stay here, niño ?" our Span- a climate, where frost is unknown, with

ish friend asked.

"I and the goats; si, Señor."

"And at night?"

mines and rich lands, why are the people poor?"

"Where the poor pay the taxes," he

"At night also; a man comes from the answered, "it must be so. Down in valley."

"And what do you make?"

Thirty reals a month "-which is in American money five cents a day. "And your food?"

"And my food," he answered. "What do they give you?"

"Good bread, Señor, and onions; sometimes a piece of cheese; sometimes, not very often, soup. Shall I show the Señoras the youngest kid?"

Malaga you know the Calle Larios, which is named after the Marquis Larios? He owns that street. He has interests everywhere in Malaga; the sugar refineries, they are his, and he owns more in other parts of the province; the churches are in his hands he gives to them. And who can tax Larios ?"

"Why not?" we asked.

"No one dares," my friend answered. "He has power; he dictates, he and some

shall not be done; and who shall dispute him? They call him a public benefactor; he gives to the poor, he gives to the hospital, he dictates concerning the public officials of the city."

He went to the house and came out others, what shall be done here and what with the youngest kid in his arms. "See!" he said; "it is too little to jump yet. Eight I have. This one has not lived its seventh day. It is too young to have a name. My sister thinks Victoria for a name, and I am for Fraquita; it will be for the Señora to choose."

He was thirteen perhaps, or fourteen, well grown, sweet-spoken, with the look in his eyes of a boy who sits gazing at the sea and at the mountains all day, at peace with himself and all the world. He carried the little kid back to the house, calling as he went, "Nini, nini!" And then he led out those big enough to have names, and which already jumped.

"How much does the man make who lives with you?" I asked.

"It sounds," I said, "like what we call at home 'the boss.""

Our friend looked blank.

Those

What

"The boss'?" he questioned; he did not understand. "It is the remnants of the feudal system. The Larios are a great family, and they always had power. You remember the cork forests through which you passed yesterday? belong to the Dukes of Mthey pay in taxes is negligible, and as the Government must be supported, the poor must pay. The poor pay on everything they bring into the city unless it is wine or bread. Eight cents for each fowl they pay; they must pay so much on each pound of oil, so much for eggs, so much for produce. Besides this, the Government again taxes them on the gross output, and when they have paid rent to those who own the land, what remains to them? The man who makes a peseta a "We are day the year round and his bread is fortunate. Many work for this only for a certain part of the year, and from their twenty cents they must save for the winter, and feed from it, besides their children."

"Pedro? Much- -a peseta a day, with his food; he is a man. He works on the farm with my masters, and at night he drives up the other goats and we shut them into the room next the one where we sleep."

"Is that a usual wage?" I asked my friend. Twenty cents a day and food?"

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"Why not?" he answered. poor people in Spain."

Below us the gardens lay fertile in the sun; to the south of us rose mountains where we knew are iron mines rich in ore; a few days before we had passed up

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"We have heard that the Spanish cities sell their Octroi duties to the highest bidder; so the control of the city customhouse duties passes into the hands of a private concern. Does not this make it harder for the peasants ?"

"Certainly," replied our friend; "but the city must have money, and with the city to run its own octrois every peasant would be a smuggler, and there would be no revenue; the officers would come to understandings with certain peasants and they and the peasants would profit. A private concern looks better after its affairs.

"There is a new way, too, of getting money from the people besides taxing; we are beginning to follow your methods in Spain. The millers in the south formed what you call a 'trust.' They mixed the grains and raised the price of bread so that our poor people eat less bread, and in consequence many mills are idle in the country."

"But with war so near at hand," we asked, "and your troops to feed-how should flour mills be idle?"

"The French," he answered, "and the Americans thought of that market first, and supplied flour. Our millers of the south and those of the north who use imported grain were quarreling together to make what you call a deal,' and neglected the Melilla market."

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"They say since our tariff reforms that you exported last year more than forty per cent increase of ore to our country."

"That does not affect our people; those mines are owned in England and in Germany. The miners get from a peseta to a peseta and a half a day."

"But if the people suffer," we asked, "from what you call the remnants of your feudal system on the one hand and from the modern system of trusts on the other, what happens to them? How do they live ?"

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ignorant that the chief man in the village may come to them and say, 'There is no election this year. I remain as before.'"

"But in the north you have had troubles-when the reserves were called out instead of the troops already under arms, and Barcelona was in a state near revolution."

"That is the north," he replied "Andalusia and Catalonia are two places.'

And I remembered the story of a friend of ours who had traveled in South America, and in Paraguay he had seen a flag which he did not know framed in black, and when he asked, "What is that flag?" the answer had been:

"It is the flag of my people, the flag of Catalonia, which will one day be a republic; and until then it is framed in black."

It is a hard thing for us who think of one vast country as America to realize how in Spain each community lives for itself, and it was here impressed upon our minds that the man in Malaga thinks of himself first as a Malaganian and next as a Spaniard.

This, I think, is a fundamental thing in the life of Spain: each little community has its own separate entity; each little town around Malaga has its separate individual existence, curiously unaffected by the neighborhood of a great city. Even in Palo, where the tram takes you, you find people living in a different epoch of civilization. In Malaga you are in a South European town, half surrounded by a palm-planted Alameda; in the harbor are steamships from all the Mediterranean ports, and other steamships there are ready to take you to South America, to North America, to England-where you will; and half an hour away, bound to Malaga by a series of villas surrounded by blooming gardens, is Palo, a fishing village built on a dry arroyo which in one place broadens out into something like an open square, bordered by tiny houses hollowed out of the soft rock-little caves

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"We have a theory with us that when in which the fishermen live. They are people starve there is trouble."

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"Not here," he answered. They are used to it. They have always starved, and the weak among them die. They don't know any better. Hardly any one in the villages can read. They are so

clean and whitewashed as any Moorish house, and as little encumbered with the unnecessary things of life.

Here, in the near suburbs of this modern city, men live in caves as they have lived for just how long no one knows; or

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rather, I should say, sleep in caves, for they live on the beach or without the house, the women netting great nets, the men and boys engaged in the work of the sea, perpetually pulling up their heavy nets or hauling up their forty-foot boats on the beach for the night. In Malaga it is as in other cities of Spain: one may see at every hand the old order and the new in sharper contrast than in any other of the European countries. One can descend from the electric

from the railway, others as you walk around the country-a mass of brownishred roofs, a church, narrow streets like irregular white slits, and frowning over all, very likely, the heavy masonry of some Moorish ruin.

And it was to such a little town that we journeyed, nineteen kilometers, by carriage and by mule. Almogia sits high among the hills, nine kilometers by the road and ten more by mule. Not once along the whole road did the almond trees fail us,

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tramway to run into a group of prairie schooners drawn by oxen, or see strings of pack-mules with gay trappings being unloaded before modern warehouses. But sharper than any contrast between prairie schooner and trolley car, than between the lateen fishing boat and the steamers which crowd the port of Malaga, is the contrast between the city of Malaga itself and many of the little towns back in the hills.

You see these towns, some of them

and the almond trees of Malaga are one of the beautiful things I have seen in the world. They bloom when the faintest mist of green appears on the bare red earth, before they put out their leaves. Now single trees grew by the steep trail, flinging their branches against a brilliant sky, branches white if you like, but with a very gentle bloom of pink over them, very fragile and very lovely-a very valiant tree, for they dare to bloom when other trees are bare and the ground is

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bare, and gain in beauty by this contrast. Orchards of them there were in the valleys, and orchards on steep hillsides, throwing a white mist of flowers against the brilliant rocky hillsides, which in places glowed a deep red in the sun. There were whole fields planted with young almond trees, each tree a tiny nosegay. Now and then our trail made us look down into solid masses of flowers neither pink nor white, a color too delicate and too illusive to have an exact name. again, the trail was bordered by trees, while on other slopes the silver green of olive and the bloom of the almond were mingled. Nowhere was there the careful terracing which one sees from one end of the Riviera to the other and through

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