elf.

"After all mother knows best," he was thinking. "That foolish Lyaeus
will come dragging himself into Toledo a week from now."

Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso he had seen the day before
in Illescas. Don Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a long
red sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and a small leather bottle of
wine on the sward in front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark of
which he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey horse.

"_Hola_, my friend," cried Don Alonso, "still bent on Toledo?"

"How soon can I get there?"

"Soon enough to see the castle of San Servando against the sunset. We
will go together. You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the honor
of eating something, you must be hungry." Thereupon Don Alonso handed
Telemachus the sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with.

"How early you must have started."

They sat together munching bread and sausage to which the sweet pepper
mashed into it gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head thrown
back, let a little wine squirt into their mouths from the bottle.

Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of sausage held between bread by
tips of long grey fingers.

"You are now, my friend, in the heart of Castile. Look, nothing but
live-oaks along the gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under a
tremendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In Madrid there is not so
much sky, is there? In your country there is not so much sky? Look at
the huge volutes of those clouds. This is a setting for thoughts as
mighty in contour as the white cumulus over the Sierra, such as come
into the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-striding...." Don Alonso
put a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a
potential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid,
robust.... I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizing
it, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker.... But the day
will come when in this gruff land we shall have flower and fruit."

Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head thrown back against the
twisted trunk of the olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet,
and after rummaging a moment in the little knapsack that hung over his
shoulder, produced absent-mindedly a handful of small white candies the
shape of millstones which he stared at in a puzzled way for some
seconds.

"After all," he went on, "they make famous sweets in these old
Castilian towns. These are _melindres