The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we
would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not.
We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo,
adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which
need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm
bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the _patio_
roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately
stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and
flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still
fourteen years old.
But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be
presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent
Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American
hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged
steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with
unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry
after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable
loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our
host, waiting skull-capped in the _patio,_ that we were in no real
palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by
the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip
his city with a hotel of poetic perfection.
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