DIVERSIONS OF TRAVEL

If Sahagun puts you out of conceit with Castile, you are not likely to
be put in again by Palencia; for a second-rate town in this kingdom is
like a piece of the plain enclosed by a wall, and only emphasises the
desolation at the expense of the freedom; and as in a windy square all
the city garbage is blown into corners, so the walled town seems to
collect and set to festering all the disreputable creatures of the
waste.

Mr. Manvers, his meal over, hankered after broad spaces again. He
walked the arcaded streets and cursed the flies, he entered the
Cathedral and was driven out by the beggars. He leaned over the bridge
and watched the green river, and that set him longing for a swim. If
his maps told him the truth, some few leagues on the road to Valladolid
should discover him a fine wood, the wood of La Huerca, beyond which,
skirting it, in fact, should be the Pisuerga. Here he could bathe,
loiter away the noon, and take his _merienda_, which should be the best
Palencia could supply.

"Muera Marta,
Y muera harta,"

"Let Martha die, but not on an empty stomach," he said to himself. He
knew his Don Quixote better than most Spaniards.

He furnished his haversack, then, with bread, ham, sausages, wine and
oranges, ordered out his horse, satisfied himself that the ostler had
earned his fee, and departed at an ambling pace to seek his amusements.
But, though he knew it not, the finger of Fate was upon him, and he was
enjoying the last of that perfect leisure without which travel,
love-making, the arts and sciences, gardening, or the rearing of a
family, are but weariness and disgust. Just outside the gate of
Palencia he had an adventure which occupied him until the end of this
tale, and, indeed, some way beyond it.

The Puerta de Valladolid is really no gate at all, but a gateway. What
walls it may once have pierced have fallen away from it in their fight
with time, and now buttresses and rubbish-heaps, a moat of blurred
outline and much filth, alone testify to former pretensions. Beyond
was to be found a sandy waste, miscalled an _alameda_, a littered place
of brown grass, dust and loose stones, fringed with parched acacias,
and diversified by hillocks, upon which, in former days of strife,
standards may have been placed, mangonels planted, perhaps Napoleonic
cannon.

It was upon one of these mounds, which was shaded by a tree, that
Manvers observed, and paused in the gateway t