This at least is mainly the
trace that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes; and after
Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in fact, more
corn than anything else, though there were many orchards, also
endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red showing among the
leaves still green on the trees; if there had been something more
wasteful in the farming it would have been still more homelike, but a
traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were often terraced, as
in Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The
farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was
molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their
tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They were
never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to let them pass
for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in _Don Quixote,_ if I
had thought of these in time. But one ought to be honest at any cost,
and I must own that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing with
every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I
never once recurred to it.
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