We made such long stops that the lights began to fade
out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a
station which we were so long in coming to that we thought it must be
next to Granada, a Spanish gentleman got in with us; and though the
prohibitory notice of _No Fumadores_ stared him in the face, it did not
stare him out of countenance; for he continued to smoke like a
locomotive the whole way to our journey's end. From time to time I
meditated a severe rebuke, but in the end I made him none, and I am now
convinced that this was wise, for he probably would not have minded it,
and as it was, when I addressed him some commonplace as to the probable
time of our arrival he answered in the same spirit, and then presently
grew very courteously communicative. He told me for one thing, after we
had passed the mountain gates of the famous Vega and were making our way
under the moonlight over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood of
battles long ago, that the tall chimneys we began to see blackening the
air with their volumed fumes were the chimneys of fourteen beet-root
sugar factories belonging to the Duke of Wellington.
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