was done the young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself
to a steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had
taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of thunder and
long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning,
such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when
Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner
chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in
our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well
as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the
station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who
intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to
our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort,
during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of
historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently
flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the
dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and
motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately
stair from a beautiful glass-roofed _patio,_ columned round with airy
galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome
us.

The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against
our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not
sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue.
The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we
would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not.
We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo,
adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which
need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm
bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the _patio_