As we left our front window open during the night for air, we were many times awakened by the voices of the picture-gazers who gathered at our window as soon as the day broke.
[Footnote 14: "She has painted my donkey, _my_ donkey."]
The peasant who came every morning with his daughter and donkey-cart full of vegetables and fruit at the dawn was rather like a genial bird of prey in features. This type is typically Spanish. There was something of the condor about him, though one can scarcely picture a condor with his welcoming smile or his kindly nature. He began with a fixed idea of our practical dumbness and deafness to the Spanish language. He was, we learned later, an exquisite dancer. We have heard tell of a well-known musician who has a dance for making the household beds, and another for digging potatoes, and so on, trying to bring æsthetics into the commonplaces of life. Coneni, for such was the peasant's name, tried to dance for us the fact that tomatoes were a halfpenny a pound or that a melon was sixpence. His pretty, demure daughter resorted to more practical measures, held up fruit as samples and condescended to calculate in pesetas and centimos instead of in "royals" and "little bitches."
But the manners both of Coneni and of his daughter were impeccable. I think that they overcharged us slightly, but that was the Spanish tradition. Certainly they did not overcharge us as much as they would have done had they not liked us, and later on they quieted their consciences by making us presents.
Coneni was one of the first of our picture admirers, but he had pre-Raphaelite tendencies, and always said that he supposed they would be better when we painted them out properly. He became eager that we should sketch in his market garden, and gave us elaborate topographical directions. So one day, shouldering our sketch-boxes, off we set.
We passed through El Angel on to the Murcia road. We then asked a group of men, who were winnowing corn on a flat biblical threshing floor of beaten mud, which was the direction. Unfortunately we had got rather mixed in the name. The peasant had not spoken his name very clearly and we had confused it with conecho.[17] The winnowers said that they could not understand us very clearly, but that it was probably further along, and they wished us to "go with God." Further along the road we, having found in the dictionary what conecho really means, tried the other name.