“Left alone, I drew my chair near to the chest of drawers, whereon I had set the blue candlestick; I had two hours before me, and I felt as an explorer might feel on the verge of a new country. Here was a document written by a dead hand, an intimate document, private property, not edited and re-edited, but quietly owned by dignified and unassuming descendants, who would neither cheapen nor profane by giving the dead man’s confidence to the world. It was probable that no intelligently interested eyes but mine would ever read it. I hesitated for an appreciable time before I opened the diary, and in that pause my eyes wandered from the little book to the little garments on the bed, and I fancied that these inanimate objects, made animate by the spirit of their respective owners, called to one another yearningly across the silence of my room. “When I at last opened the diary I found myself carried straight away into an unanticipated world. The man, whose name and rank, ‘Oliver Pennistan, captain, Dragoons,’ I read on the fly-leaf, was writing in Spain. His first entry was dated Madrid, 1830. He wrote without conscious art, and indeed his daily jottings seemed to me solely the occupation of a lonely evening; at one moment he was annoyed because he had been given _pan de municion_, which was hard, black, and uneatable, instead of _pan de candeal_; at another, he had been overcharged by his landlord, and feared he must exchange into a different posada. “He was innocent of literary artifice, this Pepys of nineteenth century Spain, yet the natural, matter of fact, unstudied candour of his daily biography brought the preposterous age before me, crimped and grotesque, the Spain of Goya. Eighteen-thirty, an incredible period in any country, attained in Spain an incredibility which turned it into a caricature of itself. Oliver Pennistan, I knew, wore whiskers and an eyeglass; tight, straight, high military trousers; drawled; guffawed; said ‘Egad.’ As for the women of his acquaintance, I knew them to be frizzed and fuzzed, with faces mauve beneath their powder, and hearts sick with sentiment beneath their tight bodices. I did not know what had taken Oliver Pennistan to Spain, but I supposed that he was a younger son, as I had heard Amos boast of the dozen boys of his grandfather’s generation. “Still I did not connect his Spanish experiences with the Pennistans I knew. I read the Madrid portion of his diary without impatience, because I was greatly entertained by the subtle flavour of the age which I found therein, but when he came to packing his valise preparatory for a trip to Cadiz, I fluttered the pages over, looking for his return to England. I wanted to get to the dancer who now sat in the room below mine roasting chestnuts over the fire. I was disappointed to see that the diary never accompanied him to England, and I began to fear that his courtship and marriage would not be revealed to me.