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And so to Baeza and a mosquito cage bed in a hotel which smelt as hotels smell when they are the worst. Next day we went on to beautiful Cordoba. Here was a new vision of Spain, one less ascetic and fierce than that of the North. The sun had driven out the somber. In Cordoba with its white houses and fresh-blooming flowers, its beautiful gates and doors and interior courts with palms and fountains, we had a vision of beautiful living. The whole of Cordoba is like a precious work of art. I suppose every one who learns to love it must be loath to leave it.

But we are making for that window on to the New World, longing for that new way to India—the new Spain. The train goes on along the Guadalquiver valley through all the sherry vineyards growing green for miles, the town of Xeres itself, and onward to Gibraltar and the end of the world. And there at the end, far out on a loop of land on the loveliness of the sea, was Cadiz, the city of Armadas and the going and coming of the Plate Fleet, a city now of white houses, Spaniards, cats of all kinds, and innumerable parrots who out-talk humanity on its streets—of all that, but of few ships. I walk along the sea front on that street that bears the proud name Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and I see three ships, and among them the one that is waiting for me.