I
The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile. Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now, in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I rashly declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find the other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed, to our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to and our baggage put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had chosen, and from a search for hearthstones in others; and we drove to the only hotel they had left unvisited. There at our demand for fires the landlord all but laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the hotel as if to ask what better we could wish than that. We drove back, humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but to declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he had offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel, and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women wailing through the freezing corridors, "Can't she understand that I want boiling water?" and, "Can't' we go down-stairs to a fire somewhere?" We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.