h the
sure-footedness of his Arab blood. An Andalusian horse cares nothing for
the ground on which he goes, though it be hard and unyielding as iron;
and he clambers up and down steep, rocky precipices as happily as he
trots along a cinder-path.

I passed a shepherd in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, holding a
crook. He stared at me, his flock of brown sheep clustered about him as
I scampered by, and his dog rushed after, barking.

'_Vaya Usted con Dios!_'

I came to little woods of pine-trees, with long, thin trunks, and the
foliage spreading umbrella-wise; round them circled innumerable hawks,
whose nests I saw among the branches. Two ravens crossed my path, their
wings heavily flapping.

The great charm of the Andalusian country is that you seize romance, as
it were, in the act. In northern lands it is only by a mental effort
that you can realise the picturesque value of the life that surrounds
you; and, for my part, I can perceive it only by putting it mentally in
black and white, and reading it as though between the covers of a book.
Once, I remember, in Brittany, in a distant corner of that rock-bound
coast, I sat at midnight in a fisherman's cottage playing cards by the
light of two tallow candles. Next door, with only a wall between us, a
very old sailor lay dying in the great cupboard-bed which had belonged
to his fathers before him; and he fought for life with the remains of
that strenuous vigour with which in other years he had battled against
the storms of the Atlantic. In the stillness of the night, the waves,
with the murmur of a lullaby, washed gently upon the shingle, and the
stars shone down from a clear sky. I looked at the yellow light on the
faces of the players, gathered in that desolate spot from the four
corners of the earth, and cried out: 'By Jove, this is romance!' I had
never before caught that impression in the very making, and I was
delighted with my good fortune.

The answer came quickly from the American: 'Don't talk bosh! It's your
deal.'

But for all that it was romance, seized fugitively, and life at that
moment threw itself into a decorative pattern fit to be remembered. It
is the same effect which you get more constantly in Spain, so that the
commonest things are transfigured into beauty. For in the cactus and the
aloe and the broad fields of grain, in the mules with their wide
panniers and the peasants, in the shepherds' huts and the straggling
farm-houses, the romant