my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done
either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if
I lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early
chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not
remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language
as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of
everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction;
but it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were
not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my
longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of
practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who
came to me for an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to
talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish
that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my store.
My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped his _c's_
and _z's_ like any old Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the
accent of his native Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might
have profited by his instruction if he had not been such a charming
intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and philosophy
and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the
question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the
dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor's, or the forms of greeting
and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases,
the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old
acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish)
the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the
English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I
was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if
in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing
Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my
speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in
conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am
not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The days,
or the night