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Seven Spanish Cities, and the Way to Them
Seven Spanish Cities and the Way to Them Author:Edward Everett Hale General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Roberts Brothers Subjects: Spain Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books... more ».com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. BAYONNE TO MADRID. THE journey to Burgos from Bayonne is charming all the way. The whole detention at Irun is, perhaps, half an hour. The ridge of the Pyrenees holds westward along the northern shore, but there are some fine glimpses of the Bay of Biscay. You see the island, which was neutral ground, in the river where French kings and Spanish princes used to meet. Either it was then larger, or they took very little room. The- ophile Gautier, who wrote an amusing book of travels here, says it is no bigger than a fried sole; nor is this very much out of the way. The Basques look their character, -- intelligent, handsome, serious people, -- the Yankees of Spain. I was able at Bayonne to buy a book of Basque songs, with music and translations, but not somebody's archa; ological studies there. There are people who tell you that these fishermen knew of the Newfoundland coast before Cabot, and likely enough the right explorer in the old records could find out now. The high land is not merely a line on the sea. All the way from Irun to Burgos is a difficult passage, by admirable engineering, through mountain passes. It is wonderfully picturesque, and wherever we could draw we were kept busy. There is one pass which we descended, thoroughly Swiss in its sudden turns and bold huggings of the stream. There are, alas! only too many tunnels for the picturesque. M. counted fourteen in four miles, between two stations. The people work bravely in their fields, and I think grow wheat quite high up. It may not be wheat, but looked like wheat in the ...« less