Throughout I was
tormented by question of the precise co-racial quality of some
English-speaking folk who had come to share our bone-breaking return to
Madrid in the train so deliberately waiting there to begin afflicting
us. English English they certainly were not; American English as little.
If they were Australian English, why should not it have been a
convention of polite travel for them to come up and say so, and save us
that torment of curiosity? But perhaps they were not Australians.
VII
THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE
It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how
dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the
palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist
shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent
afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its plainness, one of the two or
three things worthiest seeing among the two or three hundred things
worth seeing in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after we
returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that everybody went to the
Escorial and that it would be a proud distinction not to go. All the
time we knew we should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen
by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken
inordinately early, and might well have been started a little later.
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