te across their fronts and kept the cold
from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must have
made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall chimney
of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun invited
belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the Basque who
took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility remained a part
of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a mountain stream
brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a quiet tide for
the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry
on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.

The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into
the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled
into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage
nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of
the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands
into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any
factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the
human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that
followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the
surface of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone
that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we
ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against
the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a
succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses
were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in
harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now
rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West,
a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves
Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in
Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges
her to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the
dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away
from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in
Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or
people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence
when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking. His