Act III

Evening in the Sierra Nevada. Rolling slopes of brown, with olive trees
instead of apple trees in the cultivated patches, and occasional prickly
pears instead of gorse and bracken in the wilds. Higher up, tall stone
peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished. No wild nature
here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious
artist-creator. No vulgar profusion of vegetation: even a touch of
aridity in the frequent patches of stones: Spanish magnificence and
Spanish economy everywhere.

Not very far north of a spot at which the high road over one of the
passes crosses a tunnel on the railway from Malaga to Granada, is one
of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra. Looking at it from the wide
end of the horse-shoe, one sees, a little to the right, in the face
of the cliff, a romantic cave which is really an abandoned quarry, and
towards the left a little hill, commanding a view of the road, which
skirts the amphitheatre on the left, maintaining its higher level on
embankments and on an occasional stone arch. On the hill, watching
the road, is a man who is either a Spaniard or a Scotchman. Probably a
Spaniard, since he wears the dress of a Spanish goatherd and seems at
home in the Sierra Nevada, but very like a Scotchman for all that. In
the hollow, on the slope leading to the quarry-cave, are about a dozen
men who, as they recline at their cave round a heap of smouldering white
ashes of dead leaf and brushwood, have an air of being conscious of
themselves as picturesque scoundrels honoring the Sierra by using it as
an effective pictorial background. As a matter of artistic fact they are
not picturesque; and the mountains tolerate them as lions tolerate lice.
An English policeman or Poor Law Guardian would recognize them as a
selected band of tramps and ablebodied paupers.

This description of them is not wholly contemptuous. Whoever has
intelligently observed the tramp, or visited the ablebodied ward of a
workhouse, will admit that our social failures are not all drunkards and
weaklings. Some of them are men who do not fit the class they were born
into. Precisely the same qualities that make the educated gentleman an
artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an ablebodied pauper. There
are men who fall helplessly into the workhouse because they are good
far nothing; but there are also men who are there because they are
strongminded enough to disregard the social convention (obviously not a
disinterested one on the part of the ratepayer) which bids a man live
by heavy and badly paid drudgery when he has the alternative of walking
into the workhouse, announcing himself as a destitute person, and
legally compelling the Guardians to feed, clothe and house him better
than