brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were
neither. I do not say all French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are
as clean as they are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard to
get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of
steps; in fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy
of access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which the
Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take advantage of
their trust by transferring much of their heavy stuff to them. Without
owning that we were such travelers, I find this the place to say that,
with the allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, our excess
baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in a
month's travel, with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to
Algeciras in the extreme south of Spain.




II


But in this sordid detail I am keeping the reader from the scenery. It
had been growing more and more striking ever since we began climbing
into the Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon the whole it was not so sublime
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