he time we
reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and
by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it
was storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the
curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded
promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid
sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands
standing out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with
the stony cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and
we shivered in the splendid sight.

III.

The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the
prettiest town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully
contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a
noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its principal
street, shaded with a double row of those feathery tamarisks, and with
handsome shops glittering on both sides of it. Very easily it is first
of the fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has his villa
there, and the court comes every summer. But they had gone by the time
we got there, and the town wore the dejected look of out-of-season
summer resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine
casino at one end of the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all
along it to the other end. On the sand were still many bathing-machines,
but many others had begun to climb for greater safety during the winter
to the street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping up from the surf
and seeking shelter among those that remained, but they were mostly
tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward through their open doors,
and made no secret of their cozy domesticity, where they sat and sewed
or knitted and gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and mothers
they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be resting from the summer
pleasure of others. They had their beautiful names written up over their
doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there were
other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their owners whom
we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into the carts
drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but pulled by a
band drawn over their foreheads under their horns, and they had the air
of not liking the arrangement; though, for the matter of that, I have
never seen o