erential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers,
there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world.

First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who
bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his
door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like
his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then his
work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of
neighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of things
half real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived and
where politicians wrote in the newspapers,--and _Francia_--and all that
was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and
wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat
and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so
strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of
the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite
past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans,
before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much the
same, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed,
cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought and
passed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged
up to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin had
taken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth goddesses, and
the deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love for
the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the
walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men
who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling
of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassing
hills of their commune, except the God which was the synthesis of their
souls and of their lives.

Here lies the strength and the weakness of Spain. This intense
individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated
village communities--_pueblos_, as the Spaniards call them--over the
changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and
mature and die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolution has
been strong enough to shake it. Invasion after invasion, of Goths, of
Moors, of Christian ideas, of the fads and convictions of the
Renaiss