From Our Carriage We Passed As In A Dream Between The Dress-Coated Head Waiter And The Skull-Capped Landlord

Who silently and motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately stair from a beautiful glass-

Roofed _patio,_ columned round with airy galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome us.

The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue. The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not. We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo, adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the _patio_ roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still fourteen years old.

But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our host, waiting skull-capped in the _patio,_ that we were in no real palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination, and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even Spanish travel, has given me.

II

One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some such emotion as one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's _Legends of the Conquest of Spain;_ or to read in some such (if there is any such other) imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as Gautier's _Voyage en Espagne,_ the miserably tragic tale of that poor, wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick?

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