Introduction 



upon " Las Alforjas ; or, The Bridle Roads of Spain, by 

 George John Cayley," a book in two volumes with a 

 quaint woodcut title-page to each, bearing a picture of two 

 men in Andalusian garb, two mules, and the bulging 

 alforjas that gave the title to the work ? It is not too 

 much to say that the book for the first time opened the 

 gates of a new world to the eager youngster who devoured 

 it. I can recollect through the long dim vista of inter- 

 vening years, as if it were yesterday, the exquisite delight it 

 gave me to realise from its pages that romance and pic- 

 turesqueness were not confined, as I had supposed, to the 

 men and times of long ago, but still surrounded us in our 

 daily lives if only we had the faculty to see them. Spain, 

 the workaday Spain that I knew, assumed a new guise. 1 

 realised, as if by a flash of lightning, that the costumes I 

 had seen so often were picturesque, that the turns of speech 

 familiar to me were quaint and archaic, that the dirty- 

 looking posadas I had peeped into were widely different 

 from English country inns ; and that the stern rugged 

 granite mountains bathed in glow of gold and shadows of 

 purple brought to the soul a new sense of the beauty of 

 atmosphere. I learnt from the book for the first time that 

 the world was fair to look upon, and that adventure with a 

 delightful spice of lawlessness and risk was within the reach 

 of a boy who mounted a donkey and rode along the high- 

 ways and byways that I had seen from the banquette of a 

 diligence or from the windows of one of the few Spanish 

 railroads then in existence. 



I revelled in the high-spirited adventures or the two 

 young Englishmen who had bought ponies in the extreme 

 south of Spain, and had ridden them unattended, disguised as 

 Andaluz muleteers, through all the country to the Pyrenees. 

 It was patent to me, of course, that the writer was 



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