tful prairies and the
intervening plains of New Castile.

Such is Toledo, the famous, the wonderful, the legend-spun primate city
of all the Spains, the former wealthy capital of the Spanish Empire!

Madrid usurped all her civic honours under the reign of Philip II., he
who lost the Armada and built the Escorial. Since then Toledo, like
Alcala de Henares, Segovia, and Burgos, has dragged along a forlorn
existence, frozen in winter and scorched in summer, and visited at all
times of the year by gaping tourists of all nationalities.

Even the approach to the city from the mile distant station is
peculiarly characteristic. Seated in an old and shaky omnibus, pulled by
four thrashed mules, and followed along the dusty road by racing
beggars, who whine their would-be French, "_Un p'it sou, mouchieur_,"
with surprising alacrity and a melancholy smile in their big black eyes,
the visitor is driven sharply around a bluff, when suddenly Toledo, the
mysterious, comes into sight, crowning the opposite hill.

At a canter the mules cross the bridge of Alcantara and pass beneath the
gateway of the same name, a ponderous structure still guarding the
time-rusty city as it did centuries ago when Toledo was the Gothic
metropolis. Up the winding road, beneath the solemn and fire-devastated
walls of the Alcazar, the visitor is hurriedly driven along; he
disappears from the burning sunlight into a gloomy labyrinth of
ill-paved streets to emerge a few minutes later in the principal square.

A shoal of yelling, gesticulating interpreters literally grab at the
tourist, and in ten seconds exhaust their vocabulary of foreign words.
At last one walks triumphantly off beside the newcomer, while the
others, with a depreciative shrug of the shoulders and extinguishing
their volcanic outburst of energy, loiter around the square smoking
cigarettes.

It does not take the visitor long to notice that he is in a great
archaeological museum. The streets are crooked and narrow, so narrow that
the tiny patch of sky above seems more brilliant than ever and farther
away, while on each side are gloomy houses with but few windows, and
monstrous, nail-studded doors. At every turn a church rears its head,
and the cheerless spirit of a palace glares with a sadly vacant stare
from behind wrought-iron _rejas_ and a complicated stone-carved blazon.
Rarely is the door opened; when it is, the passer catches a glimpse of a
sun-bathed courtyard, gorgeously alive wit