Foreboding the inner
chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in
our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well
as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the
station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who
intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to
our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort,
during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of
historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently
flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the
dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and
motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately
stair from a beautiful glass-roofed _patio,_ columned round with airy
galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome
us.
The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against
our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not
sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue.
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