Dear W.,—I can manage your date, but don’t quite feel drawn to your country. Norway is all mountains, and I want a little archæology. I had been thinking of Provence.
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Dear E.,—No objection to Provence. Blank’s will give us a passage in one of their colliers to Bilbao, and we can ride in across the Pyrenees. You must allow me some mountains.
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Dear W.,—It’s awfully good of Blank’s. But once at Bilbao, why not stick to Spain? Toledo{2} is no further than Toulouse, and Cantabria as mountainous as the Pyrenees.
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Dear E.,—Very good! Spain first; and Provence second string if necessary. There’s a boat sailing about May 20th.
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The casting vote was indisputably the collier’s; but our plans were not quite so inconsequent as this conclusion might lead one to infer. Some nebulous notion of a Spanish expedition had been miraging itself before our eyes for several seasons previously; and it is the nature of such nebulous notions to materialise accidentally at the last. Hitherto we had been awed by the drawbacks; for Spain had been pictured to us as positively alive with bugbears. Travelling was difficult—nay, even dangerous; the people were Anglophobists, the country a desert, and the cities dens of pestilence. The roads were unridable, and the heat unbearable. We should be eaten of fleas, and choked with garlic; and to crown all our other tribulations, we should have to learn a new and unknown tongue. The knight who plunged into the lake of pitch had hardly a more inviting{3} prospect; and the fairy palaces beneath it did not yield him an ampler reward. Provence still waits unvisited; neither have we now any immediate intention of going there. We still keep going to Spain.
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