a green landscape of growing
corn and grape, vineyards framed for our eyes with distant hills flaming
in Spanish colours, red and gold. Colonel O'Donnel pointed out an isolated
elevation which he said was the exact centre of Spain; and of course there
was a convent on its top. Every other hill had a ruined watch-tower, brown
against a sky of deeper, more thoughtful blue than Italy's radiant
turquoise. Men we met rode upright as statues on noble Andaluz animals,
grand as war-horses in mediaeval pictures; but some did not scorn to turn
abruptly aside at sight and sound of our motor, to go cantering across
fields to a prudent distance. Carters with nervous mules held striped rugs
over the creatures' faces till we had passed; donkeys brayed and hesitated
whether to sit down or run away, but ended in doing neither; yet no man
frowned.

Dick said that now, at last, he began to feel he was really in Spain,
because we met the right sort of Spanish faces, the only kind he was ready
to accept as Spanish. He had been satisfied with the strongly
characteristic qualities of everything else (especially the balconies, the
hall-mark of domestic architecture in Spain); the rich, oily cooking; the
pillows, oh, the stony pillows! the manners of the people, and the
costumes of Castile. But the features of the people hadn't been, till
to-day, typical enough to please him. He had expected in the north
mysterious looking Basques; then, something Gothic or Iberian, if not
Moorish, with a touch of the Berber to give an extra aquiline curve to the
nose. But not a bit of it! Noses were as blunt as in England, Ireland, or
America, and might have been grown there. It was only this morning that we
had flashed past a few picture-book Spanish features, and fierce, curled
moustaches.

"Wait till you get farther south," murmured the Cherub, "you will see the
handsome peasants. They put townspeople to shame."

"And mantillas--I want mantillas," said Dick. "I've only seen one so far,
except in the distance at Vitoria; I expected every woman to wear one. Now
you, senorita, owe it to your country."

Pilar laughed. "Fancy a mantilla in a motor-car. You haven't _seen_ me
yet, senores--no, not even when I went to the play. When we're at Seville,
why, then you'll be introduced to the Real Me. Look you, I have but one
sole hat in this wide world, beyond this motoring thing I bargained for at
Burgos. You've no idea what a hat--such a hat as a self-respecting s