s head.

I went my way, and at first the road was not quite solitary. Two men
passed me on donkeys. '_Vaya Usted con Dios!_' they cried--'Go you with
God': it is the commonest greeting in Spain, and the most charming; the
roughest peasant calls it as you meet him. A dozen grey asses went
towards Ronda, one after the other, their panniers filled with stones;
they walked with hanging heads, resigned to all their pain. But when at
last I came into the mountains the loneliness was terrible. Not even
the olive grew on those dark masses of rock, windswept and sterile;
there was not a hut nor a cottage to testify of man's existence, not
even a path such as the wild things of the heights might use. All life,
indeed, appeared incongruous with that overwhelming solitude.

Daylight was waning as I returned, but when I passed the olive-grove,
where many hours before I had heard the _malaguena_, the same monotonous
song still moaned along the air, carrying back my thoughts to the
swineherd. I wondered what he thought of while he sang, whether the sad
words brought him some dim emotion. How curious was the life he led! I
suppose he had never travelled further than his native town; he could
neither write nor read. Madrid to him was a city where the streets were
paved with silver and the King's palace was of fine gold. He was born
and grew to manhood and tended his swine, and some day he would marry
and beget children, and at length die and return to the Mother of all
things. It seemed to me that nowadays, when civilisation has become the
mainstay of our lives, it is only with such beings as these that it is
possible to realise the closeness of the tie between mankind and nature.
To the poor herdsman still clung the soil; he was no foreign element in
the scene, but as much part of it as the stunted olives, belonging to
the earth intimately as the trees among which he stood, as the beasts he
tended.

* * *

When I came near the town the sun was setting. In the west, tempestuous
clouds were massed upon one another, and the sun shone blood-red above
them; but as it sank they were riven asunder, and I saw a great furnace
that lit up the whole sky. The mountains were purple, unreal as the
painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and
there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate
that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and
red, and the rift in the clouds was a k