Then, as the night deepened with me at my book,
the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada,
and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of
seventy-four.
I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience
so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me
in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest
with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which
was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however
unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I
never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever
the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my
infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so
inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more
or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep
my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not
always succeed.
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