One train left for San Sebastian while I was still lost in amaze that
what I had taken into my mouth for fried egg should be inwardly fish
and full of bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance, which I
somehow understood, that there would be another train soon. In the mean
time there were most acceptable Spanish families all about, affably
conversing together, and freely admitting to their conversation the
children, who so publicly abound in Spain, and the nurses who do nothing
to prevent their publicity. There were already the typical fat Spanish
mothers and lean fathers, with the slender daughters, who, in the
tradition of Spanish good-breeding, kept their black eyes to themselves,
or only lent them to the spectators in furtive glances. Both older
and younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of Occidental
civilization, lurking or perking in deep-drooping or high-raking hats,
though already here and there was the mantilla, which would more and
more prevail as we went southward; older and younger, they were all
painted and powdered to the favor that Spanish women everywhere corne
to.
When the bad breakfast was over, and the waiters were laying the table
for another as bad, our Basque porter came in and led us to the train
for San Sebastian which he had promised us. It was now raining outside,
and we were glad to climb into our apartment without at all seeing what
Irun was or was not like. But we thought well of the place because we
first experienced there the ample ease of a Spanish car. In Spain the
railroad gauge is five feet six inches; and this car of ours was not
only very spacious, but very clean, while the French cars that had
brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were
neither. I do not say all French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are
as clean as they are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard
to get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of
steps; in fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy
of access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which the
Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take advantage of
their trust by transferring much of their heavy stuff to them. Without
owning that we were such travelers, I find this the place to say that,
with the allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, our excess
baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in
a month’s travel, with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to
Algeciras in the extreme south of Spain.