At Bobadilla, the junction where an English railway company begins
to get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted
enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when
a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, "Tea, sir?" I gladly closed with
the proposition. "But you've put hot milk into it!" I protested. "I know
it, sir. We 'ave no cold milk at Bobadilla," and instantly a baleful
suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into a upas tree of
poisonous conviction: goat's milk does not keep well, and it was not
only hot milk, but hot _goat's_ milk which they were serving us at
Bobadilla. However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of goat's
flesh, at the other end of the room, and with these one could console
oneself. There was also a commendable pancake whose honored name I never
knew, but whose acquaintance I should be sorry not to have made; and all
about Bobadilla there was an agreeable bustle, which we enjoyed the
more when we had made sure that we had changed into the right train for
Granada and found in our compartment the charming young Swedish couple
who had come with us from Seville.

Thoroughly refreshed by the tea with hot goat's milk in it, by the
genuine ham sandwiches and the pancakes, my note-book takes up the tale
once more. It dwells upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of
the farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the mountain ranges
which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no doubt that if
I had then read that most charming of all Washington Irving's Spanish
studies, the story, namely, of his journey over quite the same way we
had come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in lively
comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, I
find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain coloring which it
professes to have found green, brown, red, gray, and blue, but whether
all at once or not it does not say. It is more definite as to the
plain we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages,
cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings,
so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of
wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through.
It did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of
peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but
their neatness testified to the pros