Familiar Spanish Travels by William Dean Howells

Page 1 of 148

Produced by Eric Eldred

FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS

By W. D. Howells

ILLUSTRATED HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXIII COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1913

TO M. H.

[Illustration: 01 PUERTA DEL SOL--GATE OF THE SUN--TOLEDO]

CONTENTS

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY

III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS

IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

V. PHASES OF MADRID

VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO

VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE

VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE

IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

XI. TO AND IN GRANADA

XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other: the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book, the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada, and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of seventy-four.

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