pieces during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long
retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the depraved
descendants of the reforming German colonists by the Guardias Civiles,
had given us a day of so much excitement that we were anxious to have it
end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had chosen from, our
Baedeker. I would not have any reader of mine choose it again from my
experience of it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad;
certainly the fault was not the hotel's that it seemed as far from the
station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances,
have, been _a_ merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of
the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the _patio_ which had
formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter
welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the
young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their
location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing
alley, the interpreter made himself still more our friend and called
mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we wished _interiores_ and
would take nothing else, though he must have known that no such rooms
were to be had. He even abetted us in visiting the rooms on the _patio_
and satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the waiter
brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in the house beside
our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the
inevitable. They declared that the people whom we heard uninterruptedly
clattering and chattering by in the street below, and the occasional
tempest of wheels and bells and hoofs that clashed up to us would be the
very last to pass through there that night, and they gave such good and
sufficient reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must.
Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were
wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got
any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but