These innumerable pastures and wheat-fields
are in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they are in La
Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own
at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had
read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no
country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however
really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries
out of one's reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read
_Don Quixote_ and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the
map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or
eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his
adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier
and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the
_Don Quixote_ country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods
where one could rest in the shade, and hide one's self if one wished,
after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain
unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure
tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got
them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my
life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels
where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and
arrest.
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