We had already seen
a Spanish gentleman whom we knew as a fellow-sufferer at Burgos, roaming
the streets of Valladolid, and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt,
interrogating the windows of our hotel; and now we learned from the
Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in the inn which a
patrician omnibus had borne him away to from our envious eyes at the
station. We learned that our South American compatriots had found their
own chosen hotel impossible, and were now lodged in rapturous
satisfaction under our roof. Their happiness penetrated us with a glow
of equal content, and confirmed us in the resolution always to take the
worst omnibus at a Spanish station as the sure index of the best hotel.
The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through
lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances,
groaned unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and
we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the promenade
below already astir with life: not the exuberant young life of the night
before, but still sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A
crippled newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying his papers;
an Englishman was looking at a plan of Valladolid in a shop window; a
splendid cavalry officer went by in braided uniform, and did not stare
so hard as they might have expected at some ladies passing in mantillas
to mass or market.
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