Excerpt from The Bridle Roads of Spain There was a stripling once, long long ago, who, strange as it seems now, was in some sort identical with myself. He did not think it at the time, but he must have been rather an unusual boy; for he had an overmastering passion for books, and cared not for much else. He had been taught very little, but he was already trilingual, and devoured everything in the shape of reading in either of his three tongues that fell into his way. From the strange mixed mental pabulum thus provided he gained much vague impression and stuff for dreams, but no sense of reality or of the applicability of what he read to actual life. Once into his hands, which were mine, there came, I know not how, a book in English with a Spanish name, Las Alforjas. Anything Spanish appealed to me, for I loved the very sound of the Castilian words; and the saddlebags, of which the title was the translation, were familiar Objects to me: brightly embroidered twin sacks of stout canvas to sling across the back of a mule or eke to carry oneself at a pinch in lieu of the carpet-bag or portmanteau of civilisation. Moreover, Spain itself meant to me as a boy a place of pleasant, but perfectly prosaic, sojourn, where elderly relatives were delightfully indulgent and had expansive views with regard to tips. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.