the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny
morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted
all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over
vast plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching
and billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the
mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle
distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or
embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should
have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have
an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in
it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city
of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange.
Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and
if the reader's knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this
association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.

[Illustration: 14 RICHES OF GRAY ROOF AND WHITE WALL MARK ITS INSURPASSABLE ANTIQUITY]

I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day's
demand upon the city's wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly
have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole
life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that
beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable
orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather
give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and
give another day to it and come every year and give a day. This very
moment, instead of writing of it in a high New York flat and looking
out on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that
glass-roofed _patio_ of our histrionic hotel, engaging the services
of one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal
Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord to shun
the cicerone of another hotel as "an Italian man," with little or no
English.

As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us;
but I hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of
the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor
things were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable. The
inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the majority, but
neither we