AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES


As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward
Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the
air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an
autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of
northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city
where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical
air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of
my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter
who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other:
the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to
dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would
give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of
seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada
from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in
the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than
the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally
ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even
longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly
into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided
for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves
and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple
orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the
drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio