dy shaken in his valuation
of Spaniards.

Quitting the tableland, ten minutes of leaping and scrambling brought us
to a collection of miserable huts built all higgledy-piggledy along the
edge of a torrent, overtopped by a square building of more consequence,
built of grey stone and roofed with slate shingles, but with nothing but
ill-shaped holes for windows; and this, Don Lopez with some pride told
us was his castillo. A ragged crew of women and children, apprised of
our coming by the guide, maybe, trooped out of the village to meet us
and hailed our approach with shouts of joy, "for all the world like a
pack of hounds at the sight of their keeper with a dish of bones,"
whispers Jack Dawson in my ear ominously. But it was curious to see how
they did all fall back in two lines, those that had hats taking them off
as Don Lopez passed, he bowing to them right and left, like any prince
in his progress.

So we up to the castillo, where all the men of the village are assembled
and all armed like Don Lopez, and they greet us with cries of "Hola!"
and throwing up of hats. They making way for us with salutations on both
sides, we enter the castillo, where we find one great ill-paved room
with a step-ladder on one side leading to the floor above, but no
furniture save a table and some benches of wood, all black and shining
with grease and dirt. But indeed the walls, the ceiling, and all else
about us was beyond everything for blackness, and this was easily to be
understood, for a wench coming in with a cauldron lights a faggot of
wood in a corner, where was no chimney to carry off the smoke, but only
a hole in the wall with a kind of eaves over it, so that presently the
place was so filled with the fumes 'twas difficult to see across it.

Don Lopez (always as gracious as a cat with a milkmaid) asks Moll
through Don Sanchez if she would like to make her toilette, while dinner
is preparing, and at this offer all of us jump--choosing anything for a
change; so he takes us up the step-ladder to the floor above, which
differs from that below in being cut up into half a dozen pieces by some
low partition of planks nailed loosely together like cribs for cattle,
with some litter of dry leaves and hay in each, but in other respects
being just as naked and grimy, with a cloud of smoke coming up through
the chinks in the floor.

"You will have the sole use of these chambers during your stay," says
Don Lopez, "and for your better assuran