ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1913
TO M. H.
CONTENTS
I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES
II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS
IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID
V. PHASES OF MADRID
VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO
VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE
VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE
IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE
X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS
XI. TO AND IN GRANADA
XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA
XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA
FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS
I
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES
As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward
Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the
air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an
autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of
northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city
where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical
air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of
my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter
who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other:
the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to
dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would
give him shelter.
In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of
seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada
from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in
the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than
the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally
ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even
longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly
into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided
for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves
and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple
orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the
drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada,
and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.
I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me
in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my
infatuation or try to scoff it away.
