Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Crossing the Pyrenees HEN we first conceived the idea of a tour in Spain, we excited the surprise and concern of our fellow- dwellers on the Riviera. With one voice they said, "Don't go." They told us terrible tales of fierce brigands, of persistent beggars, of stone-throwing urchins, of bloodthirsty Iberian fleas, of omnipresent garlic, of omnipotent oil, of slovenly slaveys, of slatternly scullions, of unclean hotels, of extortionate railway fares, of slow railway trains, of exasperating custom-houses. When this liturgy of woe was chanted to us, we were temporarily appalled. But when we asked our warning friends if they spoke from personal experience, the invariable reply was : " No, but I was told "— or, " Everybody knows that "— or, " I once knew a man who said ".... In short, we found no one among the Riviera dwellers who had traveled in CROSSING THE PYRENEES Spain. So we protested that travelers' tales must come at first hand. But here a gaunt English spinster, with old-gold hair and a polka-dot complexion, shook her head warn- ingly and said, " You forget the Globus Trot- tuses." Our faces fell. We had indeed. The Globus Trottuses, who were stopping at an-' other Riviera hotel, had in truth " done Spain " the year before. In the course of their peninsular travels the curious cookery of Spain had given Mrs. Globus Trottus such a case of acute indigestion that Mr. Globus Trottus suffered from reflex insomnia. But on closely investigating the Globus Trottuses' tale of woe, I found that they had in every case put up at the most expensive hotels, where the cookery was not Spanish but French. Hence the resultant indigestion, even if picked up in Spain, was distinctly not Iberian, but Gallic. So we resolved to cross the Rubicon —or, rather, the Pyrenees. But even...