THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
quent artificial irrigation. That irrigation, as well as the water supply for the house, was furnished by a well which was worked with a big scoop-wheel studded on its circumference with buckets which emptied their contents into a trough. This ancient piece of machinery was kept in motion by a mule going round and round the better part of each day. It was called the “Noria.” An old gardener superintended it. His name was Don Pepe. He looked like a dull-witted rustic, and not at all like a nobleman entitled to the appellation of Don. But Doña Carolina, as Mrs. Perry was called by her friends, told me that he was one—that there were villages in Spain where every inhabitant was noble, and Don Pepe had come from such a village. But he had to work like any other poor peasant. I saw him turn the soil in the vegetable garden with a kind of plow such as might have been in use at the time of Julius Cæsar. It consisted of a wooden pole, one end of which was charred for the purpose of hardening it. About the middle of its length another pole was fastened at an acute angle so as to stick out parallel with the ground. To the outer end of this pole a mule was hitched, and with this instrument Don Pepe did his plowing. There was not an ounce of iron on the whole implement. I inquired whether it would not be more economical to provide Don Pepe with a more modern plow. But the answer was that Don Pepe understood his old ancestral plow and no other, and that it was not advisable to confuse his mind with newfangled contrivances. I had occasion to observe, however, that Don Pepe did not stand alone in his stolid fidelity to ancient customs. From the windows of my bedroom in the “Quinta” I overlooked a wheat field belonging to a farm immediately outside of the city. When the wheat had been cut a threshing-floor was prepared in the open field by beating a little piece of ground hard. On this the wheat crop was spread
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