pped like Basques with the red birret.

It was like coming into a picture which our arrival had, in some magic
way, endowed with life; and the effect did not wear off as we ran into the
shadow-tunnel, where the brown dust lit up with flames of colour. Under
the balconies bristling over narrow _calles_, little shops and booths
blazed with red and green peppers, glowed with oranges and the paler gold
of lemons, glimmered with giant pearls which were Spanish onions.

Miranda, I thought, was worthy of Old Castile; and when but a short
distance further on, the way seemed blocked by a high ridge of mountains
flung across our path, I began to hope that my mother's country--that home
of highest Spanish pride and honour--had some real magnificence of scenery
to give us. We wound into the splendid gloom of the gorge of Pancorbo, cut
like a sword-cleft in the rock; and I said that this scene alone was worth
a journey into Spain.

There was room only for the road, and the foaming Oroncillo tearing its
way through the mountain. High over our heads, where fingers of sunlight
groped, the railway from Paris to Madrid looped its spider's web along the
precipice, winding through tunnel above tunnel in miniature rivalry with
the sublimities of the St. Gothard. Below, deep in the shadow of the
gorge, crouched the sad village of Pancorbo itself, stricken, desolate,
articulate only in its two ruined castles on the height, Santa Engracia
and Santa Marta, imploring Heaven with silent appeal. Still higher,
towered a guardian mountain of astonishing majesty, seeming to bear aloft
on a petrified cushion a royal crown of iron. It was a place to call up in
memory with eyes shut. This was the majestic entrance into Castile; but it
raised my hopes only to dash them down. Once past the serrated needles and
fingers of Dolomite rock which made the grandeur of the gorge, we came
again to monotony of outline, and began to realize Castile as it is; a
vast and lonely steppe, wind swept, bounded by an infinite horizon.

Treeless, silent, unbroken by hedge or boundary, guarded by a ruined
watch-tower on each swelling hill, the illimitable plain lay sombre and
impressive.

No labourers were to be seen; no villages were in sight, whence men could
come to till the land; nevertheless, everywhere were signs of cultivation
by invisible hands, harvests to be reaped by men who would spring from one
knew not where.

Yet the monotony of these tremendous spaces was