Besides This Middle Ground There Is Another Neutral Territory At Gibraltar Which We Traversed After Luncheon, In Order To Say That We Had Been In Spain.

That was the country of many more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this.

We used then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his _Tales of the Alhambra,_ and his history of _The Conquest of Granada,_ and we read Prescott's histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world and the new. We read _Don Quixote,_ which very few read now, and we read _Gil Blas,_ which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain. But now, I saw, was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching with us asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral territory and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming immediately true. It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of Spanish travel that the driver of the state coach which we first engaged should, when we presently came back, have replaced himself by another for no other reason than, perhaps, that he could so provide us with a worse horse.

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