Note 29 — I SPANISH CHARACTER

Spaniards prefer to enjoy time as a gift sent by the gods, than to waste it in trying to spend it too nicely. El tiempo lo da Dios; Dios mejora las horas; Con el tiempo maduran las uvas. To a peasant two o’clock on a day of March is “four more hours of sun.” Time is not parcelled out mechanically into tiny divisions by clocks. Distances are given by hours—an hour to a league. The Catalans are less lavish of the minutes; to a stranger asking the distance to a village near Tarragona, a peasant answered cannily in Catalan, “un cuart y mitj”—that is, the village was a quarter of an hour and half a quarter of an hour distant. Curiously the Catalans give the hour as in German, e.g. half-past eight is dos cuarts de nou—halb Neun.