There Were No Longer Any Factory Chimneys; The Villages Seemed To Turn From Stone To Mud; The Human Poverty Showed Itself In The Few Patched And Tattered Figures That Followed The Oxen In The Interminable Furrows Shallowly Scraping The Surface Of The Lonely Levels.

The haggard mountain ranges were of stone that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we ran

By a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West, a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges her to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking.

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