flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still
fourteen years old.

But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be
presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent
Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American
hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged
steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with
unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry
after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable
loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our
host, waiting skull-capped in the _patio,_ that we were in no real
palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by
the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip
his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten
his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I
remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination,
and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even
Spanish travel, has given me.

II

One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some
such emotion as one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one
feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of
retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after
dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this
Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky
warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric
bulb dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and
unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving's _Legends of the Conquest
of Spain;_ or to read in some such (if there is any such other)
imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as
Gautier's _Voyage en Espagne,_ the miserably tragic tale of that poor,
wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes
to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes
to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in
the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish
studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been
without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well
enough for all purposes of