Valladolid, which we visited in an interval of the afternoon, and there
is a very personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope of
seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. But there had been no
feast of bulls; and we had to make what we could out of the walking and
driving in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long,
discouraging course there were some good houses, but not many, and the
promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in
private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public ones
as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in the
horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their
hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray. No
ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her
nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but
men of every class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind
of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese:
flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.

I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in
the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that
I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my way
through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of the
man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my
struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate
of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much
labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I
came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to