of Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise
so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We were alone in the
corridor where we met, and our eyes confessed us kindred spirits, and
I hope he understood me better than if I had taken him in my arms and
kissed him on both cheeks.

I really had no time for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness
the farewell scene between the leading lady and the large group of
young Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to
the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they
cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which
she acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady's
lady's-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window
to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and
said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, _"Adios,
hombres!"_ ("Good-by, men!"), and vanished with us from their applausive
presence.

With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was
snow on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving
Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of
the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight
night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal
drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before
the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have
floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within
and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.

XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at
Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and
farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a
fog as white and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled
plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as
we had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted with
white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were
plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, and in a certain
place there was a small vineyard; in one of the middle distances there
spread a forest of Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was
abundance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which grew lonelier
as we began to mount from the level. Olives,