er in the same hotel; sometimes
it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange
amusing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these
fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have been an
unbroken holiday.

There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by
innkeepers and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains
without buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and
we abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to get
places some hours in advance. But once established in the ten-foot-wide
interior of the first-class compartment which we had to ourselves, every
anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flattering emotion than
that which you experience in sinking into your luxurious seat, and,
after a glance at your hand-bags in the racks where they have been put
with no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the
joy of the novel landscape.

The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were
supposed to be devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not
think that in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to
taste any essential detail of the scenery..But I wish now that I had
known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned many of
the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two
hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely valleys held in the
embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of Indian corn were varied by
groves of chestnut trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their
stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been stripped away,
leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top of the stalks, which looked
like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive
contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the
farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick
and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars
trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The
houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered
into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a
bell-tower in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of the
larger houses an economy of the sun's heat, the only heat recognized
in the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the
balconies that stretched qui