Spanish Highways and Byways

He ran with that wonderful sprightliness of his across the marbled court to meet us, and ceremoniously conducted us up the handsome staircase. He led us through all "our house,"...

Reminders of the pilgrims were all along our route. Overflowing as Santiago's young knights were with martial and romantic spirit, when the brigands did not give their steel suf...

All Spaniards venerate the name of _Isabel la Católica_, nor is the impressionable De Amicis the only foreigner who has trembled and wept at Granada before the enshrined memoria...

We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said, _buen muchacho_, a good boy. The boat appea...

The Government, which had finally assumed the charges and care of the obsequies, had been remiss in not providing lines of soldiers to hold an open way for the cortège. As it wa...

Our Madrid mass meeting was of chief consequence in impressing the Government with the weight of popular opinion. The swaying multitude was called to order at quarter of ten by...

It is a little better when, at last, the bridge is left behind. Turning to the northwest, the dusty road runs on beside the river and beneath the bluffs lined with rowdyish folk...

On the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of April Seville annually keeps, on the _Prado de San Sebastian_, where the Inquisition used to light its fires, the blithest of spr...

"The first time I ever heard the name," he added, "was some three or four years ago, when I noticed an old gentleman standing often in front of my house, and gazing at the Briti...

Then more and more the landscape became Spanish. Little stone hamlets dozed in ever shallower valleys, mule trains and solitary horsemen moved slowly down poplar-bordered highwa...

We would go for the lesson to a severe little chamber, whose only ornament was a crucifix of olive wood fastened against the wall. Then how those velvet eyes would glow and spar...

Light-hearted Andalusian though he was, he had full share of the energy and enterprise of young manhood. Like the dons of long ago, he was equipping himself for the great Wester...

The bull-fighters of Andalusia are eminently religious and are said, likewise, to be remarkable for their domestic virtues. All their manly fury is launched against the bull, an...

The lawmakers of Vizcaya were duly chosen by their fellow-nobles, for every Basque held the rank of _hidalgo_, or "son of somebody." The deputies met every two years in the vill...

The legend runs that Velázquez became a knight of St. James by a royal compliment to the painter of _Las Meninas_. This picture, which seems no picture, but life itself, eterniz...

Don't pin-prick my poor old dolly, _Do_ Respect my domestic matters. _Re_ Methinks she grows melancholy, _Mi_ Fast as her sawdust scatters. _Fa_ Sole rose of your mama's posy, _...

Still, as of old, Spaniards are temperate in food and drink. "It's as rare to see a Spaniard a drunkard as a German sober," wrote Middleton three centuries ago. They use more wa...

A team of gayly-caparisoned mules with jingling bells had meanwhile trundled away the mangled bodies of the slaughtered animals, fresh sand had been thrown over the places slipp...

More and more the purple mountains were folding us about, until at last we arrived at Granada, too tired for a thrill. Mr. Gulick's constant care, which had secured us harborage...

The economists, who say so firmly that "nothing should ever be given to mendicant children," can hardly have had the experience of seeing Murillo's own cherubs, their wings hidd...

The Madrid theatre recks naught of early risers. The opening vaudeville is seldom under way before nine o'clock; the house is cleared after each performance, and often the encor...

He proved a blood-curdling conductor, always speaking in a hoarse whisper and glancing over his shoulder in a way to make the stoutest nerves feel ghosts, but he showed us, unde...

The ecclesiastical Toledo, seat of the Primate of all Spain, is one of the Spanish cities which still observe Corpus Christi as a high solemnity, and Toledo is within easy pilgr...

There is a market-garden game, where one acts as gardener, others as vegetables, and others as customers. Others, still, come creeping up as thieves, but are opposed by a barkin...

Mediæval pilgrims, when they had thus won their way to the entrance of the _Capilla Mayor_, and there received three light blows from a priestly rod in token of chastisement, we...

During my stifling night journey from Madrid to the north I had much chat with Castilian and German ladies in the carriage about Spanish girls. Our talk turned especially on the...

At first, beaten and pricked by his tormentors, he tore blindly round and round the _plaza_, the long rope by which he was held dragging behind him, and sometimes, as he wheeled...

In the seventh century, a rumor went abroad that the Apostle James had preached the gospel in Spain. The legend grew until, in the year 813, a Galician anchorite beheld from the...

"The Catalans are coming, Marching two by two. All who hear the drumming Tiptoe for a view. Ay, ay! Tiptoe for a view. Red and yellow banners, Pennies very few. Ay, ay! Pennies...

A tourist in Spain can hope to understand but little of that strange, deep-rooted, and complex life shut away beyond the Pyrenees. This book claims to be nothing more than a rec...

Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, _via_ Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging o...