SHOULD be sorry if I could believe that Cordova experienced the disappointment in us which I must own we felt in her; but our disappointment was unquestionable, and I will at once offer it to the reader as an inducement for him to go to Cordova with less lively expectations than ours. I would by no means have him stay away; after all, there is only one Cordova in this world which the capital of the Califate of the West once filled with her renown; and if the great mosque of Abderrahman is not so beautiful as one has been made to fancy it, still it is wonderful, and could not be missed without loss.

Better, I should say, take the rapido, which leaves Madrid three times a week at 9.30 in the morning, than the night express which leaves as often at the same hour in the evening. Since there are now such good day-trains on the chief Spanish lines, it is flying in the face of Providence not to go by them; they might be suddenly taken off; besides, they have excellent restaurant-cars, and there is, moreover, always the fascinating and often the memorable landscape which they pass through. By no fault of ours that I can remember, our train was rather crowded; that is, four or five out of the eight places in our corridor compartment were taken, and we were afraid at every stop that more people would get in; though I do not know that it was our anxieties kept them out.

At Aranjuez the wheat-lands, which began to widen about us as soon as we got beyond the suburbs of Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens of that really charming pleasance, charming quite from the station, with grounds penetrated by placid waters overhung by the English elms which the Castilians are so happy in having naturalized in their treeless waste. Multitudes of nightingales are said to sing among them, but it was not the season for hearing them from the train; and we made what shift

we could with the strawberries and asparagus-beds which we could see plainly, and the peach-trees and cherry-trees. One of these had committed the solecism of blossoming in October instead of April or May, when the nobility came to their villas.

We had often said during our stay in Madrid that we should certainly come for a day at Aranjuez; and here we were, passing it with a five-minutes' stop. We were leaving a railway station, but presently it was as if we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable pastures and wheatfields were in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they were in La Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries out of one's reading an image which one has carried into it. When I read Don Quixote, and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and m the Don Quixote country, with a river and gentle uplands, and where one could rest in the shade, hide oneself if one wished, after es rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead. treeless plain unrolled itself from to sky, naked, dull, empty; and if azure tops dimmed the clear line of western horizon, how could I have them into my early picture when I never yet seen a mountain in =

in

I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels where they would not have got a mile from home without discovery and arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I could have done better before we got so far from Aranjuez; there were gardens and orchards and a very suitable river there, and those elm-trees overhanging it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and there a white-walled white farmhouse to vary its lonely simplicity, its dreary fertility; and I could do nothing with the strips and patches of vineyard. It was all strangely African, strangely Mexican, not at all American, not Ohioan enough to be anything like the real La Mancha of my invention. To be sure, the doors and windows of the nearer houses were visibly netted against mosquitoes, and that was something; but even that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing near the Sierra Morena. Then, so long before we reached the mighty chain of mountains which nature has stretched between the gravity of New Castile and the gaiety of Andalusia, as if they could not bear immediate contact, I experienced a moment of perfect reconciliation to the landscape as really wearing the face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision. Late in the forenoon, but early enough to save the face of La Mancha, there appeared certain unquestionable shapes in the nearer and farther distance which I joyously knew for those windmills which Don Quixote had known for giants and spurred at, lance in rest. They were waving their vans in what he had found insolent defiance, but which seemed to us glad welcome, as of windmills waiting, that long time, for a reader of Cervantes who could enter into their feelings and into the friendly companionship they were offering.

Our train did not pass very near, but the distance was not bad for them; it kept them sixty or sixty-five years back in the past where they belonged, and in its dimness I could the more distinctly see Don Quixote careering against them, and Sancho Panza vainly warning, vainly imploring him, and then in his rage and despair "giving himself to the devil," as

he had so often to do in that master's service. I do not know now that I would have been nearer them if I could. Sometimes in the desolate plains where the windmills stood so well aloof, men were lazily, or at least leisurely, plowing with their prehistoric crooked sticks. Here and there the bare levels were broken by shallow pools of water; and we were at first much tormented by expanses, almost as great as these pools, of a certain purple flower, which no curiosity of ours could prevail with to yield up the secret of its name or nature. It was one of the anomalies of this desert country that it was apparently prosperous, if one might guess from the comfortable-looking farmsteads scattered over it, inclosing houses and stables in the courtyard framed by their white walls. The houses stood at no great distances from one another, but were nowhere grouped in villages. There were commonly no towns near the stations, which were not always uncheerful; sometimes there were flower-beds, unless my memory deceives me. Perhaps there would be a passenger or two, and certainly a loafer or two, and always of the sex which in town life does the loafing; in the background or through the windows the other sex could be seen in its domestic activities. Only once did we see three girls of such as stay for the coming and going of trains the world over; they waited arm in arm, and we were obliged to own they were plain, poor things.

The whole region begins to reek of Cervantean memories. Ten miles from the station of Argamasilla is the village where he imagined, and the inhabitants believe, Don Quixote to have been born. Somewhere among these little towns Cervantes himself was thrown into prison for presuming to attempt collecting their rents when the people did not want to pay them. This is what I seem to remember having read, but Heaven knows where or if. What is certain is that almost before I was aware we were leaving the neighborhood of Valdepeñas, where we saw men with donkeys gathering grapes and letting the donkeys browse on the vine-leaves. Then we were mounting among the foot-hills of the Sierra Morena, not without much bese * ting trouble of mind because of the