With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the
last time in the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man
built for his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came
to the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the
vision of the walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila.
It is said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or
before Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly promised
ourselves to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila. But
we never came, and Avila remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers
tawny gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept toward the
Spanish capital.
II
We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by
apprehensions of the _octroi_ which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled
the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage
about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such an
officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their
contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our joy,
to find that in Madrid there was no _octroi_ at all, and that the
amiable _mozos_ who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we
asked for it.
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