Guards with the same
prospect of pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always travel
first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence honored our
compartment between stations; and once an officer of their corps
conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that courteous ease and
self-respect which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks.

It was not very long after the guards appeared so reassuringly before
the station, when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and
our locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We
were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when we
ought to have been stopping at Cordova, with a good stretch of four
hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station
and another we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking old man
who had seemed interested in us from the first, and who now made some
advances in broken English. Presently he told us in Spanish, to account
for the English accent on which we complimented him, that he had two
sons studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had
visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He
was very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us for our
English and the strangeness which commends people to one another in
travel. When he got out at a station obscured past identification by its
flaring lamps, he would not suffer me to help him with his hand-baggage;
while he deplored my offered civility, he reassured me by patting my
back at parting. Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would
not when we arrived at Cordova, where two young fellows, who had got in
at a suburban station, helped me with our bags and bundles quite as if
they had been two young Americans.

V

Somewhere at a junction our train had been divided and our car, left
the last of what remained, had bumped and threatened to beat itself to
pieces during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long
retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the depraved
descendants of the reforming German colonists by the Guardias Civiles,
had given us a day of so much excitement that we were anxious to have
it end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had chosen from, our
Baedeker. I would not have any reader of mine choose it again from
my experience of it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad;
certainly the fault was