Such a town is Medina del Campo--City of the Field: a huddle of clay huts about a bastioned castle where Isabel the Catholic loved to live and where at last she died. The plains are at low ebb against the walls of Medina. They recede with their lush rhythms from this ruined arrogance which once housed Glory. Medina is like a penniless hidalgo. The town’s pride--the Castle--is a molder within the walls. And the town itself is a lay of sordid houses on mud streets, a conglomerate life of stamping peasants and braying mules and women occult like the hidden fires of their kitchens. West of Medina del Campo lies the Province of Salamanca. It is the southern spur of the kingdom of León which Castile absorbed in the eleventh century, and it is contiguous with Portugal. It is less fertile than Valladolid. That sea-like plain roughens and grows abrupt. The Castilian _borrico_ is less frequent; and likewise the crude _carro_ which it draws with the driver bouncing on its rump. Here is a land of oxen. Slow and inevitable as the day, they swing and steam beneath their wooden yokes, drawing the stone plow through the rocky loam or the cart with axleless wheels on the harsh ruts of a road. The cool young grain-shoot trills less in this land. It is a world of flocks. Sheep fleck the hills; goats cast their jagged shapes like living stones within the stony valleys. It is a world of ranches--of _dehesas_. Bulls, reared for the bull-ring--_toros bravos_--browse in great sweeps of meadow. The ranch house is of stone. It is large and bleak; if the dehesa breeds good bulls, it is rich. _Toreros_ come to study their victims, for when the bull is not “game” the _espada_ is helpless. There are many bedrooms for guests: the dining room is a long hall in mahogany or oak with crystal candelabras, lofty leather chairs, sideboard glittering with colored glasses, a bull’s-head over the door and portraits of great toreros on the walls. But the house is cold; rustic and crude it is, like the harsh earth of León. The livable room and the living room is the kitchen. The owner, in _zamarra_ and _calzón_, smokes his rank pipe by a vast open fire. (There are few stoves in this land.) A medieval spit, great enough for the whole side of a beef, stands in the blue-black chimney. And through the Castilian winter, when the wind is unbroken from the Cantábrico to the Sierra Morena, the ranch house is a cavern, but the kitchen is warm. The hidalgo has changed little from his ancestors who fought the Moor at Zamora. With him is his son, who incites the savagery of the bulls as a gardener incites the color of rare flowers; and his son’s wife, a mellow creature, quiet as the low flame of _encina_ that heats the _garbanzo_ jar upon the hearth; and her child, also, taking the breast of a nurse. The other servants sit, too, before the fire in that equality which alone a feudal sense of caste makes possible.