ds, without a tree
or a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the
immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think
of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a
relief to the spectator.

I

At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces
with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was
not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it
seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the unfinished
furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a motionless goatherd,
with his gaunt flock, an effect of comparative celerity to the rearward.
The women riding their donkeys over

The level waste, the rounding gray

in the distance were the only women we saw except those who seemed to
be keeping the stations, and one very fat one who came to the train at
a small town and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no audible
response. She excited herself, but failed to rouse the interest of the
other party to the interview, who remained unseen as well as unheard. I
could the more have wished to know what it was all about because nothing
happened on board the train to distract the mind from the joyless
landscape until we drew near Valladolid. It is true that for a while
we shared our compartment with a father and his two sons who lunched on
slices of the sausage which seems the favorite refection of the Latin as
well as the Germanic races in their travels. But this drama was not
of intense interest, and we grappled in vain with the question of our
companions' social standard. The father, while he munched his bread
and sausage, read a newspaper which did not rank him or even define
his politics; there was a want of fashion in the cut of the young men's
clothes and of freshness in the polish of their tan shoes which
defied conjecture. When they left the train without the formalities
of leave-taking which had hitherto distinguished our Spanish
fellow-travelers, we willingly abandoned them to a sort of middling
obscurity; but this may not really have been their origin or their
destiny.

That spindling sparseness, worse than utter baldness, of the wheat
stubble now disappeared