ellow hair
told me a story in French about the Emperor of Morocco, and produced a
tin of potted blackbirds which it came out were from the said
personage's private stores. Unending fountains of tea seethed in two
smoke-blackened pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut among
leaping shadows were piles of skis and the door, which occasionally
opened to let in a new wet snowy figure and shut again on skimming
snow-gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous jollity. Train time came
suddenly and we ran and stumbled and slid the miles to the station
through the dark, down the rocky path.

In the third-class carriage people sang songs as the train jounced its
way towards the plain and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked me
if I knew it was Don Francisco who had had that hut built for the
children of the Institucion Libre de Insenanza. Little by little he
told me the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner de los Rios
and the revolution of 1873, a story like enough to many others in the
annals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in its
overtones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as the
explanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me an
inkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I had
noticed in people I knew about Madrid.

Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz
del Rio, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government
scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed
the failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration of Fernando
Septimo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last flame of romantic
revolt, had shot himself for love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg,
Sanz del Rio found dying Krause, the first archpriest who stood
interpreting between Kant and the world. When he returned to Spain he
refused to take up his chair at the university saying he must have time
to think out his problems, and retired to a tiny room--a room so dark
that they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder under the
window in the town of Illescas, where was another student, Greco's San
Ildefonso. There he lived several years in seclusion. When he did
return to the university it was to refuse to make the profession of
political and religious faith required by a certain prime minister
named Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his disciples. At the
same time Francisco Giner de los Rios, then a y