The lamps grew brighter and the musick more palpable as I came to my senses, standing in torment at the edge of a publick party resembling a seventy-foot jellyfish in the process of electrocution.
"Heap the voltaick pile high", I murmurd, "and wheel out the wet-cell—the night is on its knees begging for a beating". Lights plash'd and slash'd the sky o'er our heads and the cobbl'd square rang with the bullying of "synthesizer". At moments some maiden would sashay out to'ard me, waving high her flouncèd Ra-Ra and bopping con vigore to the straines of popular protestant melodies.
Yet—I was in Popish Spaine! A meal of dead bull and a glimpse of the red-and-yellow heraldry assured me of that. And what could be the import of the import of these Danish straines, these Bjorns and 'Whig-Fields', that set athrobb the very foundations of San Lorenzo's gilded monastery (for I was there in San Lorenzo, sweete reader, and athwart the continent had I travelled on the most post-human and steeliest railes, for youre Nashe is no slouche internationally nor behindhand in locomotion) and made the caryatids jiggle to the atavist rhythms of LUTHERAN music.
I almost—I confess it, I do not shrink from confession—almost desir'd to hear some more catholickal melody, for however the spread of Protestant values and minimalist approach to personal comfort gain footholds in Europe, I do have a high tolerance for Emnity and perhaps even a constitutional Requirement for that commodity from predictable sources. To visit a foreign place and be confronted with the insipid, with the o'er-familiar, the self-made yellow meal open on the plate instead of the mysteriose seal'd Croquette with G— knows what inside is no prescription for Adventure.
However these Spanish have a way of Gyration.
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