Now the boy is as
utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a
very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man
trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited.

It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any
lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes's
house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, and
it is only fair to own that a psychological change toward Valladolid had
been operating itself in me since luncheon which Valladolid was not very
specifically to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests left us we
had said Valladolid was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and
we would like to stay there a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn
against it. One thing: the weather had clouded, and it was colder. But
we determined to be just, and after we left the house of Cervantes we
drove out to the promenades along the banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of
a better mind, for we had read that they were the favorite resort of the
citizens in summer, and we did not know but even in autumn we might
have some glimpses of their recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully
past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and when we came out on the
promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of close set mulberry trees,
with the dust thick on the paths under them. The leaves hung leaden gray
on the boughs and there could never have been a spear of grass along
those disconsolate ways. The river was shrunken in its bed, and where
its current crept from pool to pool, women were washing some of the rags
which already hung so thick on the bushes that it was wonderful there
should be any left to wash. Squalid children abounded, and at one
point a crowd of people had gathered and stood looking silently and
motionlessly over the bank. We looked too and on a sand-bar near the
shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a group of civilians. Between
their fixed and absolutely motionless figures lay the body of a drowned
man on the sand, poorly clothed in a workman's dress, and with his poor,
dead clay-white hands stretched out from him on the sand, and his gray
face showing to the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and staring;
from one of the crowded windows of the nearest house a woman hung with
a rope of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was
passing over it. On the bridge the ma