I suppose they do not always travel
first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence honored our
compartment between stations; and once an officer of their corps
conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that courteous ease and
self-respect which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks.
It was not very long after the guards appeared so reassuringly before
the station, when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and
our locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We
were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when we
ought to have been stopping at Oordova, with a good stretch of four
hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station
and another we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking old man
who had seemed interested in us from the first, and who now made some
advances in broken English. Presently he told us in Spanish, to account
for the English accent on which we complimented him, that he had two
sons studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had
visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He was
very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us for our
English and the strangeness which commends people to one another in
travel.
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