While I Indulge The Record Of These Trivialities, Which I Am By No Means
Sure The Reader Will Care For So Much, I Feel That It Would Be Wrong To
Let Him Remain As Ignorant Of The History Of Valladolid As I Was While
There.
My ignorance was not altogether my fault; I had fancied easily
finding at some bookseller's under the arcade a little sketch of the
local history such as you are sure of finding in any Italian town, done
by a local antiquary of those always mousing in the city's archives.
But
the bookseller's boy and then the boy's mother could not at first
imagine my wish, and when they did they could only supply me with a sort
of business directorv, full of addresses and advertisements. So instead
of overflowing with information when we set out on our morning ramble,
we meagerly knew from the guide-books that Valladolid had once been the
capital of Castile, arid after many generations of depression following
the removal of the court, had in these latest days renewed its strength
in mercantile and industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences of the
prosperity in the windy, dusty avenues and streets of the more modern
town; but there are lanes and alleys enough, groping for the churches
and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental
tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The mind readily goes
back through these to the palmy prehistoric times from which the town
emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past
Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian kings who made it
their residence in the eleventh century.
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