Goat's Milk Does Not Keep Well, And It Was Not Only Hot Milk, But Hot _Goat's_ Milk Which They Were Serving Us At Bobadilla.

However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of goat's flesh, at the other end of the room, and with these one could console oneself.

There was also a commendable pancake whose honored name I never knew, but whose acquaintance I should be sorry not to have made; and all about Bobadilla there was an agreeable bustle, which we enjoyed the more when we had made sure that we had changed into the right train for Granada and found in our compartment the charming young Swedish couple who had come with us from Seville.

Thoroughly refreshed by the tea with hot goat's milk in it, by the genuine ham sandwiches and the pancakes, my note-book takes up the tale once more. It dwells upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of the farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the mountain ranges which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no doubt that if I had then read that most charming of all Washington Irving's Spanish studies, the story, namely, of his journey over quite the same way we had come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in lively comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, I find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain coloring which it professes to have found green, brown, red, gray, and blue, but whether all at once or not it does not say. It is more definite as to the plain we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages, cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings, so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through. It did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the lamps began to twinkle from their windows. At a certain station, I am reminded by my careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sunset pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began to grow cooler, and the dying day to empurple the uplands everywhere, without abating the charm of the blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very homelike scene, and where there was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness was relieved by the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs to browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and blew lullingly in at our window. We made such long stops that the lights began to fade out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a station which we were so long in coming to that we thought it must be next to Granada, a Spanish gentleman got in with us; and though the prohibitory notice of _No Fumadores_ stared him in the face, it did not stare him out of countenance; for he continued to smoke like a locomotive the whole way to our journey's end.

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