lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our
interest. Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the interest
taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or
fourteen who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our
train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he seemed
to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the train. She owned
that the deserter was her father, and while we were still poignantly
concerned for her he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl
herself had apparently not shared even under pressure of the whole
compartment's sympathy.

IV

The day waned more and more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank
with that sudden drop which the sun has at last. The sky flushed
crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over the
summits billowing softly westward. There had been a good deal of joking,
both Spanish and English, among the passengers; I had found particularly
cheering the richness of a certain machinist's trousers of bright golden
corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the scene our
spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where the
sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against
the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled against the
darkening sky.

Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection that this was the
region where the natives had been so wicked in times past that an
ingenious statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined
bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and reform
them. That is what some of the books say, but others say that the region
had remained unpeopled after the first exile of the conquered Moors. All
hold that the notion of mixing the colonists and the natives worked
the wrong way; the natives were not reformed, but the colonists were
depraved and stood in with the local brigands, ultimately, if not
immediately. This is the view suggested, if not taken, by that amusing
emissary, George Borrow, who seems in his _Bible in Spain_ to have been
equally employed in distributing the truths of the New Testament and
collecting material for the most dramatic study of Spanish civilization
known to literature. It is a delightful book, and not least delightful
in the moments of misgiving which it imparts to the reader, when he
does not know whether to prize more the author's observation o