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. I rashly
declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for
rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find the
other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight
thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the
streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but
they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed, to
our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the
omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I
did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to and
our baggage put on, and we drove away.
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