or I guess strangers do not
wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza were possible characters.

But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when
one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
them.

We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but
it will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached
New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion,
at Mrs. Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but
one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the
passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:

Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
Shall suffer this fate or that:
One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
Or ground on treacherous flat.
Some shall be famed in many lands
As good ships, fast and fair,
And some shall strangely disappear,
Men know not when or where.

The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark
Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry,
they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling,
tiresome travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine,
and ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.

Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
chord, the throbbing cadence of