It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, "Good
wine needs no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos when
you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.



I


The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now,
in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we
could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it
had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one
in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped
with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was
no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was
truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south
which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing
in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his