g hair-pins, escaped his care. But
when it was dried and aired out by windows opened to the sunny weather,
it was by no means a bad compartment. The broad cushions were certainly
cleaner than the carpet; and it was something--it was a great deal--to
be getting out of Cordova on any terms. Not that Cordova seems at this
distance so bad as it seemed on the ground. If we could have had the
bright Monday of our departure instead of the rainy Sunday of our stay
there we might have wished to stay longer. But as it was the four hours'
run to Seville was delightful, largely because it Was the run from
Cordova.

We were running at once over a gentle ground-swell which rose and sank
in larger billows now and then, and the yellow Guadalquivir followed us
all the way, in a valley that sometimes widened to the blue mountains
always walling the horizon. We had first entered Andalusia after dark,
and the scene had now a novelty little staled by the distant view of
the afternoon before. The olive orchards then seen afar were intimately
realized more and more in their amazing extent. None of the trees looked
so old, so world-old, as certain trees in the careless olive groves of
Italy. They were regularly planted, and most were in a vigorous middle
life; where they were old they were closely pollarded; and there were
young trees, apparently newly set out; there were holes indefinitely
waiting for others. These were often, throughout Andalusia, covered to
their first fork with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic
superstition that this was to protect them against the omnivorous hunger
of the goats, till we were told that it was to save their roots from
being loosened by the wind. The orchards filled the level foregrounds
and the hilly backgrounds to the vanishing-points of the mountainous
perspectives; but when I say this I mean the reader to allow for wide
expanses of pasturage, where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves
for the feasts throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia are happy
beyond others in supplying. With their devoted families they paraded
the meadows, black against the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the
most characteristic accent of the scene. In the farther rather than
the nearer distance there were towns, very white, very African, keeping
jealously away from the stations, as the custom of most towns is in
Spain, beyond the wheat-lands which disputed the landscape with the
olive orchards.

One of thes