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Russell used to pay me a regular visit to the Fonda de la Playa. One morning as we were chatting, Leader strode into the coffee-room, a vision of splendour. He had got on his uniform as Commandant of the Foreign Legion a uniform which did much credit to his fancy, for he had designed it himself. He wore a white boina with gold tassel, a blue tunic with black braid, red trousers, and brown gaiters.
Absorbed in this operation, he did not see a man in a boina, with a lantern in his hand, who approached him and asked: "What are you doing here?" Without replying, Manuel broke into a run down the hill; shortly afterward the rest of the gang came scurrying down, awaked by the kicks of the man in the boina.
With all the burning indignation which still makes some of them say, "I am not a Spaniard; I am a Basque," the extraordinary advance made in this part of Spain seems to show that the hereditary energy and talent of the people are on the side of national progress. The Viscayan bóina has been lately introduced into the French army as the headgear of the Chasseurs and some other regiments.
In relief to the peasant dresses were to be noticed frequent attempts at more soldierly costume in the shape of worn tunics of the French National Guards or Moblots, and some half-dozen uniforms of the Spanish Line, with the glazed képi exchanged for the boina.
Paco obeyed, and in another moment entered the apartment. "I thought you were in your grave, Paco," said Villabuena, "and so did we all. I myself saw you lying in the dust of the road, with a sabre-cut on your head that would have killed an ox." "It was not so bad as it looked," replied the Navarrese. "Nothing like a close-woven boina for turning a sabre edge.
And the singer gazed with tearful eyes at the broad boina of black velvet, the lock of gray hair, two broken, rusty steel pens souvenirs of the Master, that Hans Keller had piously preserved in a glass case. "You knew him tell me how he lived. Tell me everything: talk to me about the Poet ... the Hero."
West Indian "English" alternated with a black patois that smelt at times faintly of French, muscular, bullet-headed negroes appeared slowly and laboriously counting their money in their hats, eagle-nosed Spaniards under the boina of the Pyrenees, Spaniards from Castile speaking like a gatling-gun in action, now and again even a snappy-eyed Andalusian with his s-less slurred speech, slow, laborious Gallegos, Italians and Portuguese in numbers, Colombians of nondescript color, a Slovak who spoke some German, a man from Palestine with a mixture of French and Arabic noises I could guess at, and scattered here and there among the others a Turk who jabbered the lingua franca of Mediterranean ports.
This man was in a sort of half-uniform; a blue jacket decorated with three rows of metal buttons, coarse linen trousers, and on his head the customary woollen boina. From underneath the latter appeared a white linen bandage, none of the cleanest, and considerably stained with blood. His face was pale and thin, and the Count conjectured him to be a wounded man, recently out of hospital.
"No, señor, but the Carlists." Some of my fellow-passengers turned pale, the ladies did not know whether to scream or consult their smelling-bottles; and before they could decide, a tall, slight, gentlemanly-looking man of some four-and-twenty years, with a sword by his side, a revolver in his belt, an opera-glass slung across his shoulder, and a silver tassel depending from a scarlet boina, the cap of the country, appeared at the hinder door of the diligence, bowed, and asked for our papers.
Short coarse jackets and loose trousers, confined at the waist by a faja, or girdle of bright-coloured woollen stuff, were worn by some; blouses of serge, knee-breeches, and stockings or gaiters, by others; but all, without exception, had the boina, or pancake-shaped woollen cap of the Basque provinces, and the alpargatas, or flat-soled canvas shoes.
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