toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since luncheon which
Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for. Up to the time the
wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting
city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there a week; then,
suddenly, we began to turn against it. One thing: the weather had
clouded, and it was colder. But we determined to be just, and after we
left the house of Cervantes we drove out to the promenades along the
banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of a better mind, for we had read that
they were the favorite resort of the citizens in summer, and we did not
know but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of their recreation.
Our way took us sorrowfully past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and
when we came out on the promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of
close set mulberry trees, with the dust thick on the paths under them.
The leaves hung leaden gray on the boughs and there could never have
been a spear of grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was
shrunken in its bed, and where its current crept from pool to pool,
women were washing some of the rags which already hung so thick on the
bushes that it was wonderful there should be any left to wash. Squalid
children abounded, and at one point a crowd of people had gathered and
stood looking silently and motionlessly over the bank. We looked too
and on a sand-bar near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a
group of civilians. Between their fixed and absolutely motionless
figures lay the body of a drowned man on the sand, poorly clothed in a
workman's dress, and with his poor, dead clay-white hands stretched out
from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to the sky. Everywhere
people were stopping and staring; from one of the crowded windows of the
nearest house a woman hung with a rope of her long hair in one hand, and
in the other the brush she was passing over it. On the bridge the man
who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized
to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring