ge on the twenty pesetas. But four-footed
beasts are tragically conscientious, and these farmyard martyrs
accomplished their task without a groan, while the Gloria crept up close
behind on her own power.

I thanked the patron saint of cow creation when the straining brutes got
to the top. The summit of the pass was crowned by a lion on a granite
pedestal; a lion with a cold air of pride in his mission of marking the
limit between Old Castile and New. For me also he marked something for
which I owed him gratitude; my deeper advance into the heart of my own
land.

Close to our resting-place at the top of the pass there was a rude hut,
and one or two wagons which had strained up from the other side were
halting their smoking teams. Here, seated in the car again, as we waited
to see the oxen unyoked and the boy paid, a girl came out from the little
house with a large volume, in which she asked us to sign our names. The
Cherub scrawled something; and as Dick was scribbling, Carmona strolled
across, to see whether or no I entrusted my name to the book. I had meant
not to do so, but now I would have changed my mind had not Colonel
O'Donnel stopped me. "I wrote your name, Cristobal," said he, in his
ambrosial voice; and the situation was saved. Carmona made some
commonplace remark to account for his approach, and walked away with a
self-conscious back, as Pilar's glance and Monica's crossed the distance
between the two automobiles and met mischievously.

The grey car took the lead again, and at a turn of the road it seemed that
the whole world lay at our feet; yet it was not even all of Old Castile,
so vast a country is my Spain.

Far as the eye could travel spread the fair land, green with the tender
green of spring, yellow with patches of golden sand, darkly tufted with
woods; struck with flying shafts of light, ringed in with ethereal blue.

Nothing could steal from me this illuminated missal of memories, and were
I to be banished to-morrow, I should have Spain to keep in my heart, I
said, as we rushed down the steep, winding way that serpentined along the
southern slope of the Guadarrama. A breakneck road it was, but nobly
engineered, twisting back upon itself in many coils, letting us fly with
the speed of a bird to lower levels; and it seemed that scarcely had we
sunk over the brink of the mountain than we were at the turn on the right
which would lead to the Escurial.

Straight before us, rising out of the bare mou