I Do Not Know That He Ever Sold Them
Or Cared; His Affair Was To Cry Them.
VI
A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO
If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in
Madrid, you have still to choose between going at eight in the morning
and arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one evening
and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case you will have
two hours' jolting each way over the roughest bit of railroad in the
world, and if your _mozo,_ before you could stop him, has selected for
your going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be sure that he
has done worse for you than you will have done for yourself when you
come back in a compartment between the trucks. However you go or come,
you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed at
every yard, or getting on without any track over a cobble-stone
pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well cushioned, as it is
in Spain nearly always, with free play for your person between roof and
floor and wall and wall; and if you go at five o'clock you have from
your windows, as long as the afternoon light lasts, while you bound and
rebound, glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer
kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and
yellow patches of vineyard.
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