her for my pleasure, and
successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had made
up the sum which he had doubtless idealized as a just reward for his
half-day's service when he first told me that it should be what I
pleased. We parted with the affection of fellow-citizens in a strange
monarchical country, his English growing less and less as the
train delayed, and his eyes watering more and more as with tears of
com-patriotic affection. At the moment I could have envied that German
princess her ability to make sure of his future companionship at the
low cost of fifty pesetas a day; and even now, when my affection has had
time to wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any future visitor
at Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, and abounding in surprises of
intelligence and unexpected feats of reliability.

IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not
at once aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach
and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or your
sky very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of a change of
mind which insists more and more. There is the same long ground-swell
of wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the
loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this
vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the
economic and topographic waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more
or less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the
landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days' unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in
the cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, but which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelan