ddened at sight of
him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver
as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the
feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave
the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal
acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have
been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I
fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as
if in testimony of the driver's derivation from those old rancid
Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never
been crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely something the
carriage had acquired from the stable, still it was to be valued for
its distinction in a country of many smells; and I would not have been
without it.

When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen
willingly paused from mending to let us by, and remained standing
absent-mindedly aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves
in a scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for spectacularity
in any theater. I hope this is not giving the notion of something
fictitious in it; I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most
dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a deep gorge of red
earth, which on the farther side climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by
enormous fissures, or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray
city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels
from which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped
themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear
that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very
noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the two
hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there
was no hint of decay.

[Illustration: 16 THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE YELLOW TAGUS]

On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but
for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost
homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes
mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks
there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown
withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of
the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant