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Familiar Spanish Travels by William Dean Howells
page 61 of 311 (19%)
and moved compassion by her gentle sorrowfulness.

Of the University, which we visited next, I recall only the baroque
facade; tha interior was in reparation and I do not know whether it
would have indemnified us for not visiting the University of Salamanca.
That was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table forbade. You
could go to Salamanca, yes, but you could not come back except at two
o'clock in the morning; you could indeed continue on to Lisbon, but
perhaps you did not wish to see Lisbon. A like perversity of the
time-table, once universal in Spain, but now much reformed, also kept us
away from Segovia, which was on our list. But our knowledge of it
enabled us to tell a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the
museum of the University, how she could best, or worst, get to that
city. Our speech gave us away to her, and she turned to us from the
other objects of interest to explain first that she was in a hotel where
she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get no English
explanation of the time-table for any money. She had come to Valladolid
with a friend who was going next day to Salamanca, but next day was
Sunday and she did not like to travel on Sunday, and Segovia seemed the
only alternative. We could not make out why, or if it came to that why
she should be traveling alone through Spain with such a slender
equipment of motive or object, but we perceived she was one of the most
estimable souls in the world, and if she cared more for getting to
Segovia that afternoon than for looking at the wonders of the place
where we were, we could not blame her. We had to leave her when we left
the museum in the charge of two custodians who led her, involuntary but
unresisting, to an upper chamber where there were some pictures which
she could care no more for than for the wood carvings below. We
ourselves cared so little for those pictures that we would not go to see
them. Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such singular
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