I Thought For Some Time
That There Was No Charge For The Fire, Or Even The Smoke We Had The
Night Before, But My Eyes Were Holden From The Item Which I Found Later,
By Seeing Myself Addressed As Milor.
I had never been addressed as a
lord in any bill before, but I reflected that in the proud
Old
metropolis of the Goths I could not be saluted as less, and I gladly
paid the bill, which observed a golden mean between cheapness and
dearness, and we parted good friends with our host, and better with our
guide, who at the last brought out an English book, given him by an
English friend, about the English cathedrals. He was fine, and I could
not wish any future traveler kinder fortune than to have his guidance in
Toledo. Some day I am going back to profit more fully by it, and to
repay him the various fees which he disbursed for me to different
doorkeepers and custodians and which I forgot at parting and he was too
delicate to remind me of.
When all leaves were taken and we were bowed out and away our horses,
covered with bells, burst with the omnibus through a solid mass of
beggars come to give us a last chance of meriting heaven by charity to
them, and dashed down the hill to the station. There we sat a long
half-hour in the wet evening air, wondering how we had been spared
seeing those wretches trampled under our horses' feet, or how the long
train of goats climbing to the city to be milked escaped our wheels. But
as we were guiltless of inflicting either disaster, we could watch with
a good conscience the quiescent industry of some laborers in the
brickyard beyond the track. Slowly and more slowly they worked, wearily,
apathetically, fetching, carrying, in their divided skirts of
cross-barred stuff of a rich Velasquez dirt color. One was especially
worthy of admiration from his wide-brimmed black hat and his thoughtful
indifference to his task, which was stacking up a sort of bundles of
long grass; but I dare say he knew what it all meant. Throughout I was
tormented by question of the precise co-racial quality of some
English-speaking folk who had come to share our bone-breaking return to
Madrid in the train so deliberately waiting there to begin afflicting
us. English English they certainly were not; American English as little.
If they were Australian English, why should not it have been a
convention of polite travel for them to come up and say so, and save us
that torment of curiosity? But perhaps they were not Australians.
VII
THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE
It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how
dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the
palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist
shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent
afterward in vain.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 90 of 197
Words from 46687 to 47200
of 103320
