“DOS billetes de primera clase para Burgos?” (Two first-class tickets to Burgos) with astonishment repeated the young woman acting as collector at the railway station of Biarritz. “To Burgos! to Burgos!”

“To Burgos,” we replied, quietly.

“If you are really going as far as Burgos,” she said, with the same look of unmitigated surprise, “I must apply to the station-master for the tickets. Have the goodness to sit down and I will see about it.”

We supposed by this young lady’s behaviour, and we afterwards found our supposition to be true, that it is a most unusual thing for ladies to travel in Spain. With one or two exceptions, we had the ladies’ coupÉ to ourselves from one end of Spain to the other, and very comfortable travelling we found it.

Our tickets came to hand in due time. We took our seats, the train moved slowly, and we felt fairly off to Spain. There was a pleasant excitement about such a journey just then, for every one prophesied a revolution in Madrid; it might come to-morrow, it must come soon, people said; and we were thought very venturesome to venture beyond the Pyrenees at all. Not that the sense of danger attracted us. We had come to Spain with very definite objects, and though we could not help feeling that the sooner a revolution came for the Spaniards the better, we hoped that it might not come till we were safely at Gibraltar, at least. The pictures of Velasquez, and the Moorish relics of Cordova, Seville, and Granada, were the loadstones that drew us to Spain; at the same time we could not but be alive to the great political and social questions agitating a country once so glorious, and still so capable of glorious things. But in a stay so short as ours was likely to be, we despaired of seeing more than the surface of Spanish thought and life, however much we might wish for other opportunities. It made us smile then, and it makes me smile now, to review the magnitude of our preparations for this trip. And now let me put down, if putting down be possible, a very absurd notion that, to travel comfortably, you should travel without luggage. I have travelled a good deal, and if I were writing a manual for all future tourists, I should affix, as a motto to the book,—“Always travel in your best clothes, and with half-a-dozen trunks at least.” Luggage and good clothes take the place of a train of servants. Luggage and good clothes ensure you good places, general civility, and an infinity of minor comforts. Luggage and good clothes will prove your good angels wherever you go. It is all very well for savages to travel without luggage—the Japanese Grandees don’t even carry pocket-handkerchiefs about with them; but if any one wants to travel pleasantly and profitably, let him carry a well-stored portmanteau. Surely in no country but patient Spain would two ladies have been allowed to fill the first-class compartment of a railway carriage in the way we did. Under the seats, on the seats, above the seats, were piled an infinite variety of packages, a box of medicines, a folding india-rubber bath, a basket of provisions (a precaution never to be neglected), two or three parcels of books, two or three bundles of rugs, a leather bag of sketching materials, sketching blocks of various sizes, a silk bag of needles and threads; lastly, an odd bag, containing note-books, opera-glasses, passports, a tea-pot, a water-bottle, an etna, an air-cushion, slippers, and sundries without number.

And everything was so useful in its turn. In that long, slow railway journey through Spain, we were, as I have said, always alone. We breakfasted, we dined, we wrote letters and diaries, we read all our books from beginning to end, and we mended our clothes, we made sketches, we made tea, we might have refreshed ourselves with a cold bath, but for want of water. Not a bit of our precious luggage could we have spared, and not a bit ever troubled us beyond the necessity of giving a few cuartos to the porters when changing carriages. As for books we were not half way through Spain before they were done, and yet we had taken a goodly supply; Ford’s Guide, Street’s Gothic Architecture, Don Quixote in Spanish, Stirling’s Life of Velasquez, Washington Irving’s pretty twaddle about the Alhambra, Chasles’ Memoir of Cervantes, the Manuals of Lavice and Viardot, Gautier’s book, and half a hundred books about Spain in French, German, English, and Spanish, among others, the delightful and racy sketches of his countrymen, by Don Ramon Mesonero de Romanos.

Of course our luggage accumulated as we went along. We bought books, maps, photographs, clothes everywhere, pottery of Andujar and Talavera, lace from La Mancha, embroidery at Malaga, capas at Granada, till, by the time we arrived at our journey’s end, our equipaje, as the Spaniards call it, was a sight for all beholders.

It was on the tenth of November that we crossed the Pyrenees, all glowing with the purple and gold of autumn, and entered Spain. What a change! It was like coming suddenly from the Tropics to the Steppes. As if by magic, the crimsons, the carnations, the violets, died out of the world, and all became cold and grey and barren. In Old Castile one fancies oneself in a desert—a desert only varied by occasional forests of the Pinus maritima, with its straight, weird stem and plumy tuft. The colour and character of the scene varied but slightly—here undulating plains of grey sand piled with columnar masses of granite, there forests of pine, the round bosses of bluish-green standing out sharp and clear against a bright blue sky; or breadths of brown corn-land, lightly ploughed for the autumn seed-sowing. There was something grand and harmonious about this wild monotony—broken rarely by an oasis of a village with ilex groves and yellow acacias and a narrow river winding near, and groups of wide-mouthed Sancho Panzas staring at us as we looked out of the window.

But I must go back to Burgos where the purples and crimsons ended and the desert began. We arrived a little before midnight and felt ourselves at last in Spain. The very air had, as we thought, a foreign smell, and so greatly did this feeling of novelty overcome us that all our Spanish vocabulary seemed to vanish just when it would have stood us in good stead. However, we found places in the omnibus of the Fonda del Norte, and, after waiting about three quarters of an hour, rattled thither in company of several Spanish gentlemen who were wrapped to the chin in their bandit-looking cloaks, and smoked away without intermission. Two or three long-limbed, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked young women, wearing enormous chignons of false hair, but no costume unless untidiness may be called one, led us upstairs flaring candles over our heads. “Dos cuartos,” we said; “Si, si,” they replied, and on they went, climbing stair after stair, till at last we caught hold of their sleeves in breathless expostulation; and they consented to descend. Finally we were consigned to rooms on the third floor, so spotlessly, ideally clean, that a sanitary inspector could have found nothing to suggest. The rooms had whitewashed walls, iron bedsteads that might have come out of Heal’s warehouse, deliciously cool floors of brick-red tiles, wool-mattrasses, sweet-smelling home-spun sheets, and pillows bordered with the lace of La Mancha. We slept delightfully, though the noise of the watchman calling the hours half awoke us now and then.

At seven o’clock, one of the maidens of the chignon, a handsome saucy creature, named Isidora, of whom we grew very fond, brought us chocolate À l’Espagnol, namely, tiny cups of sweet, thick chocolate, flavoured with vanilla, rolls of bread, glasses of exquisite water and azucarillas, or large crystals of sugar and white of egg. Isidora delighted to give us lessons in Spanish, and went into fits of good-humoured laughter at our blunders. At eleven o’clock we went to the table d’hÔte breakfast, but there was no one there excepting a Spanish-American family, consisting of a grave father, an insignificant little daughter, and a cosmopolitan son, who spoke a little English. All were very uninteresting, so there was nothing to do but study the dishes, which were all excellent, and ab ovo usque ad mala, slightly flavoured with garlic. We had tortillas or omelettes, patties of brains, water-cresses served with oil, olla podrida of bacon, sausage, cabbage, maize cobs, lentils, and other vegetables too numerous to mention, roast snipes, fig jam, and Burgos cheese. The wine was excellent too, but the invariable flavour of tar is not pleasant to the unaccustomed palate. We were served by a waitress handsomer and saucier even than Isidora. She was named Gregoria, and with her napkin swung on her left shoulder went from one to the other, saying her say, and trying to get as much entertainment as was possible out of us. We were very comfortable at Burgos, excepting that it was impossible to keep warm indoors; the sun was shining brilliantly, yet we shivered in our clean bare rooms, which were chimneyless and only warmed by charcoal pans. Round these we squatted like Arabs, but to no purpose, and we went to bed at seven o’clock, finding bed the only warm place. How the cold of winter is endured in Spain I cannot conceive, for winter does come in earnest sometimes, and no preparations seem to be made for it.

We sauntered into the most beautiful old Cathedral on the morning after our arrival, which was Sunday, hoping to find it full of peasants in holiday costume; but though there were plenty of worshippers, except for the sombreros and brown capas or cloaks of the men, and the silk and lace mantillas of the women, there was no costume at all. People seem to enjoy going to church in Spain. The ladies come in with their little dogs, drop on their knees on a mat, adjust their fans, and fall into a sort of quiet ecstasy of prayer, the dogs sitting demurely by. The men are equally devout; and every one, caballero or beggar, soldier or priest, comes in his turn, week-day and Sunday. The churches are beautifully kept, warm in cold weather, cool in summer, clean and dusky and quiet always. No wonder they are never empty.

The Cathedral of Burgos is so rich in different sorts of beauty that it would be idle for me to try and particularise any, excepting perhaps the wonderful effect of it as a whole upon the accustomed eye. At first one is quite unable to take in the wonderful simplicity, and strength, and finish of the building, or rather mass of buildings, for it is a city in itself; but later you feel, as it were, a child of the place, loving and living in every part. The colour of the outside is of a soft deep grey, and is unspeakably rich when seen, as we saw it, against quite an Eastern sky. We never grew tired of wandering about the Cathedral, with Street’s Gothic Architecture in hand to help us through its history; and no one seemed to take offence at us for pursuing such studies within the sacred walls.

I have called the building a city in itself, and if a census were made of its silent population, there might seem some reason in such a simile. Who can doubt that these sculptured saints, archangels, kings, apostles, and monks without, these bleeding Christs, Virgins, infants, and martyrs within, would equal in number the living, moving world of Burgos? And this multitude, stony, silent, dead, though it seems, is not without a power and force that stand in good stead of vitality. Every Christ has its special congregation, every martyr its believers, every saint its legend quickening thousands of devotees to this day.

There is no trace of Moorish influence in the building, and despite many excrescences of bastard-Gothic and Renaissance work, the old Cathedral is still to be seen in all its beauty, reminding you of the purest thirteenth-century Gothic of France. All who have time to study it thoroughly will at the same time acquire a good deal of history, for there is hardly a portion of it which does not show the thought and work of many minds and periods. Spaniard, Gascon, Fleming, Englishman, Florentine, have all had a hand in this glorious work, which gradually increased in size and splendour, till nothing more remained to do except to disfigure it in these later times; which I am sorry to say has been done, within and without, by various means called “restoration.”

The ecclesiologist will find plenty to admire at Burgos, but the ordinary traveller will content himself with seeing the Cathedral and the Convents of Miraflores and Las Huelgas. The latter is especially interesting on account of its history. It was founded by the husband of Alienor, daughter of our King Henry II., whose daughter Costanza became abbess. Here numbers of royal ladies took the veil; here kings were crowned and buried; and here a lady abbess still lives and rules, though no longer, as in former days, a princess palatinate, receiving princely revenues.

But what makes Las Huelgas of peculiar value to students is the evidence of Angevine influence in the architecture. Queen Alienor, as Mr. Street justly observes, would naturally procure the help of some architect from her father’s dominion of Anjou in the abbey she induced him to found; and one finds here the early vaulting common to old churches in Anjou and Poitou. But these special objects of interest are less interesting than the general effect of the whole place.

It was here, indeed, that we were bodily as well as spiritually transported back to the middle ages. The transformation happened in this wise. After wandering about the cloisters we came unexpectedly upon a scene that simply enchanted us. It was the nuns’ chapel. Looking through a screen of delicately wrought cast-iron, we saw two kneeling figures dressed in the black and cream-coloured robes of the Cistercian sisterhood. They were as motionless as statues; and we felt them to be a part of the place as much as the Gothic arches, the stained walls, and the marble altars. So mediÆval and ideal was the picture, that, when we came away, we felt as if we of the nineteenth century were dreaming, and the life of those women kneeling in the coloured light the only reality after all!

The roads are so bad around Burgos that it was with great ado we got to the celebrated Monastery of Miraflores, though it only lies two miles off the town. It is a dreary drive. The road winds around hills so bleak and desolate, as to give us an uneasy suspicion when a beggar in a long black cloak came to the carriage-door begging. He looked exactly like a bandit; and if it had not been for our sturdy coachman we should have trembled for the gold Isabelinoes we carried in our pockets.

Coming home we saw a regiment at practice. The soldiers were the shabbiest set I ever saw, the music poor, and the whole thing spiritless enough; but all the people of Burgos seemed to have turned out for the sight.

In Spain the railways are not made for travellers, but travellers for railways. The trains run so slowly and so seldom that a journey of any length always requires self-denial in the matter of sleep. No matter whither you are bound, to Alicant, to Cordova, to Saragossa, to Badajoz, you must rise early and not go to bed at all; and it is with very great management and disregard of comfort that one can contrive to travel by daylight through the most interesting tracts of scenery. To go to Madrid in the daytime we had to rise at four o’clock. It is true that the train did not start till nearly seven; but, whether you like it or not, in Spain you are always aroused an hour before you want to get up,—always carried off to the station an hour before the train starts, and to the steamers at least a quarter of a day too soon. People seem in such terrible haste to be rid of you, agreeable as the acquaintance may seem to have been on both sides.

This waiting about in the raw, cold air of an autumn morning is not without its compensations. Everything takes a supernatural shape in the ghastly lamplight; the horses that have brought us here seem, on a sudden, slim and spectral; the long lines of railway carriages have a funereal look; the men, waiting about in their long black cloaks, become brigand-like and terrible to look at; one’s own shadow is mysteriously long and dark; one’s own voice sounds hollow and unearthly. It is like reading a scene from Mrs. Radcliff’s novels. But when once the train moves slowly off, and the blessed sun warms you, it is the very poetry of railway-travelling. The carriage is so comfortable, the speed so easy, the quiet so delicious, that it is worth while coming to Spain to gain such an experience. No one seems impatient to arrive anywhere; if indeed, any one is bound anywhere. The train stops at every station, and at some so long that you might take photographs in the interval. If you alight to lunch or stretch your limbs a little, you are never hurried back into your carriage, but can loiter about in the pleasant assurance that the train is sure to wait for you. “The train is going to stop; now for a sketch,” we used to say when we approached a station; and there was always time.

And then there is the ineffable sense of safety. A single gauge leads from the French frontier to the Spanish capital; the up-train waits for the down train half-way, and each goes its destination as lazily as Kentish farmers jogging to market. How can there be accidents or discomforts under such circumstances?

Tourists are apt to complain of the incivility of officials in Spain. I can only say that we travelled from Biarritz to Gibraltar, and encountered nothing but courtesy and kindness. We spoke a little Spanish, it is true, and had left England with a solemn compact never to get out of temper, which may, perhaps, in some degree account for such experience. And we always travelled in the first-class carriage reserved for ladies. I do not think English ladies would find second and third-class travelling pleasant, on account of the smoking.

Thus we travelled through the brown deserts of Old Castille to Madrid. Treeless, tawny, and interminable, anything more dreary than these same Spanish steppes cannot well be conceived. Yet there was contrast and colour for the artistic eye. There was mass after mass of cool, grey limestone against a bright blue sky; and when the sun set over the undulating table-lands, a weird, fiery, unimagined splendour not to be put into any words!