We were sorry we had not got tickets for the leading lady's public
performance; it could have been so little more public; but we had not,
and there was nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors after
dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not
lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long in a
rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics. Very possibly
Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have not got
the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel they had not got the
steam on.




VIII


We had authorized our little interpreter to engage tickets for us by the
mail-train the next afternoon for Valladolid; he pretended, of course,
that the places could be had only by his special intervention, and by
telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We accepted his romantic
theory of the case, and paid the bonus due the railroad agent in the
hotel for his offices in the matter; we would have given anything, we
were so eager to get out of Burgos before we were frozen up there. I do
not know that we were either surprised or pained to find that our
Chilian friends should have got seats in the same car without anything
of our diplomacy, by the simple process of showing their tickets. I
think our little interpreter was worth everything he cost, and more. I
would not have lost a moment of his company as he stood on the platform
with me, adding one artless invention to another for my pleasure, and
successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had made up