sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a
succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses
were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in
harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now
rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West,
a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves
Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in
Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges her
to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the
dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away
from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in
Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or
people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence
when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking. His
English seemed meant to open the way for talk, and we were willing he
should do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at
once imagined circles in which it was now as _chic_ for Spaniards to
speak English as it once was to speak French. They are said never to
speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better
than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed,
English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture;
and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans
because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded
my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But
he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he
allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which
his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered
from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer
in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own
to strictly American readers that our speech _is_ dreadful, that it is