He had a human effect of having brushed his
hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the
effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation
in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been in a
retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever
unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I
could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of
_The Illustrious Scullion._ But he seemed on reflection not to push the
matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came
away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of his tales there or
not, it is certain that he could have exactly studied from that _posada_
the setting of the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in _Don
Quixote,_ where the knight suffered all the demoniacal torments which a
jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to inflict.
IV
Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of
Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it
is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain.
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