Familiar Spanish Travels

Familiar Spanish Travels

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Howells #63 in our series by W. D. Howells
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Title: Familiar Spanish Travels
Author: W. D. Howells
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7430] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 29,

2003]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMILIAR
SPANISH TRAVELS ***

Produced by Eric Eldred

FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS
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.

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.
I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience so
mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me in
it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things
which was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that,
however unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so
that I never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact
whenever