l to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly
without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you
have is one more popular novelist.

It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibanez and the United States should
have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no
good. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popular
novelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the inverted
Midas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it,
yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the ideals
of the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of our
national consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibanez in America will only be
a seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need we
pretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternal
things?

Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might as
well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular
vulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is.
And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno
and Azorin, poets like Valle Inclan and Antonio Machado, ... but I
suppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the
_Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_.

_X: Talk by the Road_

When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff.
They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a
tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a
sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to
the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth
chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the
blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not
thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up.
Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about
him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans
and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din
a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "_y manana
Carnaval_."

"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on
his trousers.

Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"I smell wine," he said.

Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the
thought of what his mothe