has been made. There the Cid was married; there
he held prisoner Alfonso of Leon; there was Edward the First of England
married to Eleanor of Castile; and there Pedro the Cruel first saw the
light. But if there was one regret more pressing than another, it was that
I could not go to the Town Hall and pay my respects to those bones of the
Cid, and Ximena his wife, so strangely restored to Burgos, after their
extraordinary wanderings to far Sigmaringen.

"Who is this _Thith_ you all keep talking about?" demanded Dick, as the
car spun along the river bank.

"Heavens, don't tell me that you've been brought up in ignorance of our
national hero!" I exclaimed. "If I'd dreamed of such a thing, I couldn't
have made a friend of you. Why, this was his town. He was married in the
citadel. He--"

"How do you spell him?" asked Dick, cautiously.

"C-i-d, of course."

"Great Scott! you don't mean to say my old friend the Cid was the _Thith_
all the time, and I never knew it? What a blow! I don't see why C-i-d
shouldn't spell Cid, even in Spanish; as a Thith I can't respect him."

"Then let him go to the grave with you as the Cid," said I. "But you know,
or ought to know, that 'C,' and 'Z,' and sometimes 'D' are 'th' with us."

"I never bothered much with trying to pronounce foreign languages," said
Dick. "I just wrestle with the words the best I can in plain American. But
now--I always thought it rude to mention it before--I understand why you
Spaniards seem to lisp, and hiss out your last syllables like secrets. As
for the place we're going to next--"

"Valladolid?" I pronounced it as a Spaniard does, "Valyadoleeth."

"Yes. That beats the Thith. My tongue isn't built for it, and I shall call
it simply Val."

With murmured regrets from the Cherub that we strangers were turning our
backs on Burgos without seeing all its treasures, and sighs from Pilar for
the Cartuja de Miraflores, and the most beautiful carved tomb on earth, we
turned our faces towards Valladolid.

Our road cut through the arid plain that had stretched before us
yesterday. Few trees punctuated the sad song of its monotony; but always
in the distance rose yellow hills like lions crouched asleep, lights and
shadows sailing above their heads with the bold swoop of the Titanic
birds. More than once we crossed the poor, single line of railway, the
main thoroughfare between Paris and Madrid, and Dick said that Spain
needed a few Americans to wake her up. Three tr