very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to wound;
and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been
producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my
part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent,
which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was
mortifying, all the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and
I willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We agreed
admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman went every
summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even in
Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in Spain now that the
autumn rains had begun.

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was
interesting to escape to something entirely native in the three young
girls who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us
as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in putting
them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the window till the
train started. The eldest of the three then helped in arranging their
baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly charge of the
youngest, whom she at once explained to us as _enferma._ She was the
prettiest girl of the conventional Spanish type we Lad yet seen:
dark-eyed and dark-haired, regular, but a little overfull of the chin
which she would presently have double. She was very, very pale of face,
with a pallor in which she had assisted nature with powder, as all
Spanish women, old and young, seem to do. But there was no red underglow
in the pallor, such as gives many lovely faces among them the complexion
of whitewash over pink on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the youngest
sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now being sick had only
the flush of fever in her cheeks, and propped her in the coziest corner
of the car, where she tried to make her keep still, but could not make