CHAPTER XII

WILDEST SPAIN

Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.

Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."

To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name. Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.

From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high, of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants, moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.

So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within. While outwardly it is unsurpassed. From the wall-top promenade the eye commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.

In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer. Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.

I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded. Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by tourists.

Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha. The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.

When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons the aerial little sprite men name _Wanderlust_. For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.

In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled "Buenos."

In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly back to Japan. At nearer sight, however, something of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and washtub.

Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most common of the vegetables.

All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless and shining as a Hindu's _lota_.

But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the French _bourdonner_--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it passed, my ears literally ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.

Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.

The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which, marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers, offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.

Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody, was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famed _bacalao_--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village. Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but shattered my head on the roof in question.

In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions of the dubious village. According to these, when I had passed the "Meson de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which was bending toward Gijon on the north coast, and fell into a descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs.

At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.

Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.

Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch in what passed for the principal street, I asked:

"Is there a posada in town?"

"No se, senor," she answered.

"Don't know! When your town has only nine houses?"

But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my inquiry elsewhere. With no better result, however, for each one I asked returned the same laconic, "I don't know." I had sat down on a boulder in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with few words to the house of the head man. The latter was in bed with a broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days before. I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and, after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.

Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain inviting. For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals. The wife of the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen. I knew it was that, for she said so. The place was absolutely dark. Since leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Ranadoiro. There was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered. Smoker though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained in the room.

The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken by a continual droning. The floor was stone. In the room were six or eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices. Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the floor. Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl of the concoction.

It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed cabbage indigenous to the region. A spoon was then handed me. It was of wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of them being laid in my lap. It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the earth. This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk. From my unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk I never broke bread in.

Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room, like the croak of a distant ox-cart. Since my entrance, too, I had been struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse. When it occurred to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved. The flies were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly back and forth.

But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating. Here was, it is true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian monk. Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully as large as a half-bushel measure. It is baked from four to six months ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited period.

As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two pesetas. He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have, but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than in actions, did so laconically. When I offered it again he rose half up on his elbows and bellowed "No!" His gruffness was in no sense from anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of manner. I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back. But he roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."

Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me all but headlong downward. In the depths of the third I risked a plunge into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.

To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the rest of the day would be a thankless task. For miles it wound around and upward, ever upward on the face of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to heaven. Then suddenly from each giddy height it dived headlong down into deep-wooded, fertile valleys; then up again round and round another mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub. Later in the day it took to rounding these peaks almost on the level, coming a score of times so close to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across, only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some narrow but apparently bottomless gulley.

Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had crossed the unmarked boundary between Galicia and the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias, to-day the province of Oviedo. A new style of architecture gradually became prevalent. The buildings were of two stories, the lower, of stone, housing the animals, while the dwelling proper was of wood and perched a foot or more above the lower story on four cone-shaped cornerstones, like some great awkward bird ready to take flight.

But for this peculiarity the village in which night overhauled me differed but little from that of the evening before, except in being many hundred feet nearer sea level. It was called San Fecundo. As before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered by a terse "I don't know." I found the head man in good health, however,--a stalwart fellow little past thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard. Yet so local is the dialect of every village in this region that I tried for some time in vain to make known my wants to him.

"Can't you speak Spanish, senor?" I cried out.

"No, senor," he replied like the report of a gun, and apparently angered at the allegation. We managed nevertheless by patience and repetition to establish communication between us, and I found out at last why my inquiry for a posada had evoked so surprising an answer. Public hostelries being unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do you suppose any resident will furnish me accommodations?"

The head man did in this case, in spite of my unfortunate blunder in calling him a gallego. So great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian ranges that a man from one village deeply resents even being taken for a resident of another a mile distant; while the Asturians, a blending of the aboriginal Iberian and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was kept alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and Christianity, consider themselves free and independent hidalgos infinitely superior to the submissive gallego. There were in truth some noticeable differences of character and customs, that were to increase as I advanced.

We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky, fly-buzzing kitchen, though this time the fireplace gave a bit of blaze and from time to time the rugged faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at the invitation of the village leader, flashed visible. I entertained them with such stories of America as are most customary and popular on such occasions. This was no light task. Not only were there many words entirely indigenous to the village, but such Castilian as my hearers used would scarcely be recognized in Castille. The expression "For alla" (over there) they reduced to "Pa ca"; "horse" was never "caballo," but either "cabalo" or "cabayo." Worst of all, the infinitive of the verb served indifferently for all persons and tenses. "Yo ir" might mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I should go" and even "I would have gone" and "I should be going."

Most taking of all the stories I could produce were those concerning the high buildings of New York. I had developed this popular subject at some length when a mountaineer interposed a question that I made out at length to be a query whether those who live in these great houses spend all their time in them or take an hour or two every morning to climb the stairs.

"Hay ascensores, senores," I explained, "elevators; some expresses, some mixtos, as on your railroads."

A long, unaccountable silence followed. I filled and lighted my pipe, and still only the heavy breathing of the untutored sons of the hills about me sounded. Finally one of them cleared his throat and inquired in humble voice:

"Would you be so kind, senor, as to tell us what is an elevator?"

It was by no means easy. Long explanation gave them only the conception of a train that ran up and down the walls of the building. How this overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in making clear to them; moreover there was only one of the group that had ever seen a train.

In the morning the head man accepted with some protest two _reales_--half a peseta. The highway again raced away downward, describing its parabolas and boomerang movements as before, and gradually bringing me to a realization of how high I had climbed into the sky. On every hand rocky gorges and sheer cliffs; now and again a group of charcoal-burners on the summit of a slope stood out against the dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun was rarely visible. As I descended still lower, more pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared, and by mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo. As I was leaving one of its shops a courtly youth introduced himself as a student in the University of Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was with no small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties to talk that tongue with him in the mile or two he walked with me. That night for the first time since leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public posada.

Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was so far down and sheltered that figs sold--by number here rather than weight--nine for a cent. Beyond, the highway strolled for miles through orchards of apples and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road and were trodden under foot. For the first time I understood the force of the expression, "not worth a fig."

In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon lunch I got the shock of that summer's journey. Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had seen in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving. The entire front page was taken up by a photograph showing Posadas lying in bed, his familiar face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a priest, and a fellow-torero.

"Carajo!" I gasped. "What's this; Posadas wounded?"

"Mas," replied the innkeeper shortly. "Killed last Sunday. Too bad; he made good sport for the aficionados."

An accompanying article gave particulars. The Sevillian had been engaged to alternate with a well-known diestro in the humble little plaza of San Lucar de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir. The end of the day would have seen him a graduate matador. The bulls were "miuras" five years old. As he faced the first, Posadas executed some pass that delighted the spectators. For once, evidently, he forgot his one "secret of success"; he turned to acknowledge the applause. In a flash the animal charged and gored him in the neck. He tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and was carried to the little lazaret beneath the amphitheater, while the festival continued. Toward morning he died.

All this had passed while I was climbing into the cloud-cloaked village of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an hour since I had last seen the skilful Sevillian in the ring. The article ended with the vulgarity common to the yellow journal tribe:

"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand pesetas for the privilege of taking this picture, which is almost all the unfortunate torero left his sorrowing family."

I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting little of the scene. At sunset I found myself tramping through a warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes. As dusk fell I paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder. I continued, still pensive. Several times I halted, always to receive the same reply, "A bit further, senor." Being in no sense tired, I gave the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I should certainly not have missed even without him.

The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering. One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain. With the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a supply of hay offered comfortable quarters. For an hour he of the falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:

"Mas bonita que hay, A Zaragoza me voy Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-on."

It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of civilization. Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist. The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had spent less than twelve pesetas.

A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna. The boyhood home of Gil Blas is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but one day in four. Its inhabitants have much in common with the slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and self-satisfied. Of window displays the most frequent was that of a volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores (poisoners) de Chicago." It was, possibly, an expose of the packing houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen. Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.