ade such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a
moment in glad relief.

VII

[Illustration: 07 A BURGOS STREET]

One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which
the Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then
Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the
northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage
through the open portal into its leafy _patio_ shivering in the cold,
and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which
would be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we had to pass
through another square, which we found full of peasants' ox-carts and
mule-teams; and there our guide instantly jumped down and entered into
a livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women than I could
afterward have believed possible in Spain. I bade him get back to his
seat beside the driver, who was abetting him with an occasional guttural
and whom I bade turn round and go another way. I said that I had hired
this turnout, and I was master, and I would be obeyed; but it seemed
that I was wrong. My proud hirelings never left off their dispute
till somehow the ox-carts and mule-teams were jammed together, and a
thoroughfare found for us. Then it was explained that those peasants
were always blocking that square in that way and that I had, however
unwillingly, been discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in
compelling them to give way. I did not care for that; I prized far more
the quiet with which they had taken the whole affair. It was the first
exhibition of the national repose of manner which we were to see so
often again, south as well as north, and which I find it so beautiful to
have seen. In a Europe abounding in volcanic Italians, nervous Germans,
and exasperated Frenchmen, it was comforting, it was edifying to see
those Castilian peasants so self-respectfully self-possessed in the
wrong.

From time to time in the opener spaces we had got into the sun from the
chill shadow of the narrow streets, but now it began to be cloudy, and
when we re-entered o