t when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of
Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy's villa through for
him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while
the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his
offices and honors.

But here just at the most interesting moment the successive bells and
whistles are screeching, and the _rapido_ is hurrying me away from
Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if
we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we
remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable pastures and wheat-fields
are in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they are in La
Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own
at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had
read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no
country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however
really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries
out of one's reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read
_Don Quixote_ and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the
map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven
or eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his
adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier
and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the
_Don Quixote_ country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods
where one could rest in the shade, and hide one's self if one wished,
after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain
unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure
tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got
them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my
life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels
where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and
arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures
which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I could have
done better before we got so far from Aranjuez; there were gardens
and orchards and a very suitable river there, and those elm trees
overhanging it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and there a
white-availed white farmhouse to vary its lonely simplic