It was very dramatic, the way I first saw Spain. A cold and beastly night, changing into a hot day; third-class carriage and no coffee; the first sight out of the car window in the morning a dusty plain. It could have been an alkali desert in the West. In no sense like the Italians or French, the Spanish are haughty, silent, laconic, dignified, morose, and lonely, like their plains with every now and then a brilliant patch of green. Here and there would be a castle and, clustered around its feet, tiny houses. Human beings lived there! Farther on, bands of sheep or goats, and a herder whom one could imagine a Moorish horseman with a tall spear. There was a Don Quixote at every turn. At last, the plain stretched and widened until there was a hill line like the horizon of the ocean. Suddenly, the two horns of a snail stuck up, getting larger and larger, until the animal seemed to be creeping toward us out of the distance. A cloudless sky, vast stretches, with no sign of human habitation anywhere—and the horns of the snail suddenly changed into the towers of a building—the Cathedral at Bourgos! At Madrid I saw Titian for the first time; the ones in the Louvre are of no importance. On one side of a narrow gallery in the Prado will be a Titian, and on the other side a Velasquez. The former looks five hundred years old, and the latter very modern, the difference being due, apparently, to the surface of the canvas; also the movement in my day was toward Velasquez—the free brush work and the blond note. There is one marvelous canvas of his here; no one ever did anything like it. He had painted Phillip, the king, dozens of times, and did the dwarfs and ladies of the court. Evidently the queen was tired of these, and said to him one day: “I want a picture for myself. Do just as I say. Paint my daughter in her new gown, the fool, dog, and parrot, and the king and myself looking at you while you do it.” A large order, but see what he has done! He stands in the center with his canvas; at one side the infanta, a squat dwarf, and the dog, while the king and queen are seen at the back in a doorway, with the background of a garden. Of great value to us is his palette, which he is holding in his hand, plainly showing what colors he used—red, yellow, black, and white. Upon arriving at Elche (from the Roman Illici) under whose walls Hamilcar Barca, the uncle of Hannibal, died fighting, I realized I had quietly stepped back four or five hundred years in the history of the world.