When She Had Finished They All Began To Question Whether Her
Fever Was Rising For The Day; The Good Sister Felt The Girl's Pulse, And
Got Out A Thermometer, Which Together They Arranged Under Her Arm, And
Then Duly Inspected.
It seemed that the fever _was_ rising, as it might
very well be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm,
and the eldest did not fear.
At a place where a class of young men was
to be seen before an ecclesiastical college the girls looked out
together, and joyfully decided that the brother (or possibly a cousin)
whom they expected to see, was really there among them. When we reached
Burgos we felt that we had assisted at a drama of family medicine and
affection which was so sweet that if the fever was not very wisely it
was very winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very serious case, and
it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for all concerned.
III
BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS
It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, "Good
wine needs no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos when
you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.
I
The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now,
in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we
could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it
had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one
in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped
with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was
no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was
truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south
which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing
in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his
beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure.
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