of a difference in
the color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the
treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more
black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from
the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands.
Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown,
corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths
and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do
not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed
himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him,
and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his
youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet
with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness
of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared
himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going,
especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition
from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but I
think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when
we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines
that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the
same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs of
other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the
patches of vineyard. He had there the company of tall black goats and
rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the
art of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding
wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves
wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by
the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked
prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary
landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and
especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating
the odors of the house of Cervantes.

I

There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the
Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting
them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to
our