Built And Rebuilt Its Edifices.

But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there with the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and there the pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abominable son Ferdinand VII.

It is the careful Murray who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who apparently fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes it with the remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to the royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which he held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume's _Modern Spain_ I learn that when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy's villa through for him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his offices and honors.

But here just at the most interesting moment the successive bells and whistles are screeching, and the _rapido_ is hurrying me away from Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable pastures and wheat-fields are in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they are in La Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries out of one's reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read _Don Quixote_ and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the _Don Quixote_ country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods where one could rest in the shade, and hide one's self if one wished, after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work.

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