impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked in any
of its classes. But at ten o'clock in the morning it was empty enough,
and after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed from it without
elbowing or being elbowed, and found ourselves at the portal of that
ancient _posada_ where Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least
long enough to write one of his _Exemplary Novels._ He was of such a
ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every city of Spain we should
have found some witness of his stay, but I do not believe we could have
found any more satisfactory than this. It is verified by a tablet in its
outer wall, and within it is convincingly a _posada_ of his time. It has
a large low-vaulted interior, with the carts and wagons of the muleteers
at the right of the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules
where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing uninterestedly
round at the intruders, for plainly we were not of the guests who
frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those around and behind the
stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money a day;
they supply their own bed and board and pay five cents more for the use
of a fire.

Some guests were coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous
spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal.
An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the
_patio_ overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen
watei jar, dim red; piles of straw mats, which were perhaps the bedding
of the guests, heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the
guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a
Greek perfection of profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference
that contrasted strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound
beside one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his
hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the