lilting music of a
grind-organ and with a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced.
There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-cheeked apprentice-boys
with their sweethearts, and respectable shop-keepers, and their wives
with mantillas over their gleaming black hair. All were dancing in and
out among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and
little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel of
Sancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy
in food and color and the softness of women's hair. But as I walked out
of the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet
under the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the
sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the
world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two
Spain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless
industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war.
And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again
saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his
wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands
white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steed
upon a new quest.

_IV: Talk by the Road_

Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. The sky to the east of them
was rosy when they came out of a village at the crest of a hill. Cocks
crowed behind stucco walls. The road dropped from their feet through an
avenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost. Far away into the brown
west stretched reach upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there a
few trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned lands. They stood still
breathing hard.

"It's the Tagus overflowed its banks," said Telemachus.

Lyaeus shook his head.

"It's mist."

They stood with thumping hearts on the hilltop looking over
inexplicable shimmering plains of mist hemmed by mountains jagged like
coals that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn. The light all
about was lemon yellow. The walls of the village behind them were
fervid primrose color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt. Above the
houses uncurled green spirals of wood-smoke.

Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and shouted and ran like mad
down the hill. A little voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear that
he must save his strength, so he followed sedately.

When