the landscape without fathoming the mystery which set it apart from other
landscapes.

What was so peculiar? There were hedges, and poplars, and other trees
which we had seen a thousand times elsewhere. There was a pretty, though
not extravagantly pretty, switchback road of fair surface stretching
before us, roughly parallel with the sea, giving glimpses here and there
of landlocked harbours with colliers and trampships at anchor. There was a
far background of snow mountains and a changing foreground of spring grass
and spring blossoms; interlacing branches embroidered with new leaves of
that pinky yellow which comes before the summer green.

There ought to have been nothing remarkable, save for the moving figures
which here and there rendered it pictorial; dark, upstanding men in red
waistcoats, driving donkeys; velvet-eyed girls, with no covering for their
heads but their shining crowns of jet-black hair, and none at all for
their tanned feet and ankles, though they carried shoes in their hands;
black-robed priests; brown-robed monks; smart officers; soldiers with
stiff, glittering shakos, and green gloves; oxen with pads of wool on
their classic, biscuit-coloured heads. Nevertheless, Dick agreed with me
in finding the landscape remarkable.

At last we began to wonder if the difference did not lie in colouring and
atmosphere. The sky effects were radiant enough to set the soul of an
artist singing, because of the opal lights, the violet banks of cloud with
ragged, crystal fringes of rain, the diamond gleams struck out from snow
peaks; and yet, despite this ethereal radiance, there was a strange
solemnity about the wide reaches of Spanish country, a rich gloom that
brooded over the landscape with its thoughtful colouring, never for a
moment brilliant, never gay.

"It's painted glass-window country," I said. "Old glass, painted by some
famous artist who died in the fourteenth century, and a little faded--no,
subdued by time."

"You've hit it," said Dick. "There _is_ an
old-glass-window-in-a-dim-cathedral look about the sky. It gives one a
religious kind of feeling, or anyway, as if you'd be thrown out of the
picture if you were too frivolous."

"I feel far from frivolous," said I. "But I'm excited. Look here; we'll be
in San Sebastian and out of San Sebastian soon, if we keep on. But we
mustn't keep on; for if we do we may miss the other car, and then I should
be as badly off as if I were in Ropes' place at Irun