ryone is going to Spain, and as the number of
travellers increases, so, perhaps, does the real ignorance of the
country and of her people become more apparent, for, after a few days,
or at most weeks, spent there, those who seem to imagine that they have
discovered Spain, as Columbus discovered America, deliver their judgment
upon her with all the audacity of ignorance, or, at best, with very
imperfect information and capacity for forming an opinion.

For many years, the foreign element in Spain was so small that all who
made their home in the country were known and easily counted, while
those who travelled were, for the most part, cultivated people--artists,
or lovers of art, or persons interested in some way in the commercial or
industrial progress of the nation. Even in those days, however, too many
tourists spent their time amongst the dead cities, remnants of Spain's
great past, and came back to add their quota to the sentimental notions
current about the romantic land sung by Byron. Wrapped in a glamour for
which their own enthusiasm was mainly responsible, they beheld all
things coloured with the rich glow of a resplendent sunset; their
descriptions of people and places raised expectations too often cruelly
dispelled by facts, as presented to those of less exuberant
imaginations.

[Illustration: PEASANTS]

[Illustration: PEASANTS]

On the other hand, the mere British traveller, knowing nothing of art,
almost nothing of history, and very little of anything beyond his own
provincial parish, finds all that is not the commonplace of his own
country, barbarous and utterly beneath contempt. His own manners, not
generally of the best, set all that is proud and dignified in the lowest
Spaniard in revolt; he imagines that he meets with discourtesy where, in
fact, he has gone out to seek it, and his own ignorance is chiefly to
blame for his failure to understand a people wholly unlike his own class
associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to
draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that
of the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not
exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that
visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay
in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another
question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or
from a more prolonged sojourn