When We Reached
Burgos We Felt That We Had Assisted At A Drama Of Family Medicine And
Affection Which Was So Sweet That If The Fever Was Not Very Wisely It
Was Very Winningly Treated.
It was not perhaps a very serious case, and
it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for all concerned.
III
BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS
It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, "Good
wine needs no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos when
you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.
I
The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century.
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