our cab arrived from Mount Ararat with the mire of the subsiding Deluge
encrusted upon it he led us out to it through the small boys who swarmed
upon us wherever we stopped or started in Valladolid; and whose bulk was
now much increased by the coming of that very fat woman from within the
grocery. As the morning was bright we proposed having the top opened,
but here still another convention of the place intervened. In Valladolid
it seems that no self-respecting cabman will open the top of his cab for
an hour's drive, and we could not promise to keep ours longer. The
grocer waited the result of our parley, and then he opened our carriage
door and bowed us away. It was charming; if he had a place on Sixth
Avenue I would be his customer as long as I lived in New York; and to
this moment I do not understand why I did not bargain with that blond
boy to come to America with us and be with us always. But there was no
city I visited in Spain where I was not sorry to leave some boy behind
with the immense rabble of boys whom I hoped never to see again.




VI


After this passage of real life it was not easy to sink again to the
level of art, but if we must come down it there could have been no
descent less jarring than that which left us in the exquisite _patio_ of
the College of San Gregorio, founded for poor students of theology in
the time of the Catholic Kings. The students who now thronged the place
inside and out looked neither clerical nor poverty-stricken; but I dare
say they were good Christians, and whatever their condition they were
rich in the constant vision of beauty which one sight of seemed to us