We Were Sorry We Had Not Got Tickets For The Leading Lady's Public
Performance; It Could Have Been So Little More Public; But We Had Not,
And There Was Nothing Else In Burgos To Invite The Foot Outdoors After
Dinner.
From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not
lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long in a
rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics.
Very possibly
Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have not got
the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel they had not got the
steam on.
VIII
We had authorized our little interpreter to engage tickets for us by the
mail-train the next afternoon for Valladolid; he pretended, of course,
that the places could be had only by his special intervention, and by
telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We accepted his romantic
theory of the case, and paid the bonus due the railroad agent in the
hotel for his offices in the matter; we would have given anything, we
were so eager to get out of Burgos before we were frozen up there. I do
not know that we were either surprised or pained to find that our
Chilian friends should have got seats in the same car without anything
of our diplomacy, by the simple process of showing their tickets. I
think our little interpreter was worth everything he cost, and more. I
would not have lost a moment of his company as he stood on the platform
with me, adding one artless invention to another for my pleasure, and
successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had made up
the sum which he had doubtless idealized as a just reward for his
half-day's service when he first told me that it should be what I
pleased. We parted with the affection of fellow-citizens in a strange
monarchical country, his English growing less and less as the train
delayed, and his eyes watering more and more as with tears of
com-patriotic affection. At the moment I could have envied that German
princess her ability to make sure of his future companionship at the low
cost of fifty pesetas a day; and even now, when my affection has had
time to wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any future visitor at
Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, and abounding in surprises of
intelligence and unexpected feats of reliability.
IV
THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID
When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not
at once aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach
and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or your sky
very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of a change of
mind which insists more and more. There is the same long ground-swell of
wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the
loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this
vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the
economic and topographic waste of Castile.
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