mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks
there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown
withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of
the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing
an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a
lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses,
toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more
imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the
past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those
prehistoric ages

When wild in woods the noble savage ran,

pursuing or pursued by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly
reverting through the different invasions and civilizations to that
signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became
Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at the table.
Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for
sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion's royal ideal of
eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would not have
thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a lion that
looked worthier of it.

We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen
their white houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was
lonely and at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick
of being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run
from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus, which
if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends the
landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic descent from the high