As one might think; but there is a great deal
of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the
streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered
from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other
classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the
other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no
men or women who looked great-world.
Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they
might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like
every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which
looked so pleasant.
The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is
a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish,
but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend
themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their
_patios_ to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact
of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade,
quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces or
palatial houses in my hurried impression.
