Familiar Spanish Travels | Page 5

as it was beautiful. There were some steep, sharp peaks,
but mostly there were grassy valleys with white cattle grazing in them,
and many fields of Indian corn, endearingly homelike. This at least is
mainly the trace that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes;
and after Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in fact,
more corn than anything else, though there were many orchards, also
endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red showing among the
leaves still green on the trees; if there had been something more
wasteful in the farming it would have been still more homelike, but a
traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were often terraced, as in
Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The
farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape
was molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal
their tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They
were never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to let them
pass for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in _Don Quixote,_
if I had thought of these in time. But one ought to be honest at any cost,
and I must own that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing with
every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I
never once recurred to it. That was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves by

the green margins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where
shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and maids forlorn
might wander and maunder; and here were fields of corn and apple
orchards and vineyards reddening and yellowing up to the doors of
those comfortable farmhouses, with nowhere the sign of a Christian
cavalier or a turbaned infidel. As a man I could not help liking what I
saw, but I could also grieve for the boy who would have been so
disappointed if he had come to the Basque provinces of Spain when he
was from ten to fifteen years old, instead of seventy-four.
It took our train nearly an hour to get by twenty miles of those pleasant
farms and the pretty hamlets which they now and then clustered into.
But that was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run, but, as it
were, walks with dignity and makes long stops at stations, to rest and
let the locomotive roll itself a cigarette. By the time we reached San
Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and by the time
we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it was storming in
a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the curving quays
and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. The
distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid sight of the
tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands standing
out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with the stony
cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and we
shivered in the splendid sight.

III
The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the
prettiest town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully
contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a
noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its principal
street, shaded with a double row of those feathery tamarisks, and with
handsome shops glittering on both sides of it. Very easily it is first of
the fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has his villa there,
and the court comes every summer. But they had gone by the time we
got there, and the town wore the dejected look of out-of-season summer

resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine casino at one
end of the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all along it to the
other end. On the sand were still many bathing-machines, but many
others had begun to climb for greater safety during the winter to the
street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping up from the surf and
seeking shelter among those that remained, but they were mostly
tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward through their open
doors, and made no secret of their cozy domesticity, where they sat and
sewed or knitted and gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and
mothers they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be resting from the
summer pleasure of others. They had their beautiful names written up
over their doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there
were other machines for gentlemen,