In That Dignified And Deliberate Spanish Train I Was A Man Of
Seventy-Four Crossing The Last Barrier Of Hills
That helped keep Granada
from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in
the
Little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than
the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally
ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even
longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly
into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided
for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves
and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple
orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the
drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada,
and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.
I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me
in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my
infatuation or try to scoff it away.
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