Cervantes lovers will be glad to know that the celebrated Posada de ola Sangre at Toledo, which was in danger of being pulled down or altered, has now become a national monument. Tt is but an inn: yet were Spanish inns, too often the butt of travellers' wit, to become a thing of the past, a great link with the Spain of the sixteenth century and with "Don Quixote" would be lost. Many of the scenes in "Don Quixote" occur in Spanish inns, and Cervantes' descriptions are constantly reproduced for the modern traveller in the real life of to-day. The ideal must now be that the inns should retain all their original and characteristic features—the patio (court), the great kitchen fire, the giant wineskins, the porous earthenware water jars—while adapting themselves to some extent to the requirements of the modern motorist. They should, at least, be able to produce hot meals, so often lukewarm in the better hotels, and some of the excellent native dishes.
The ideal for the inv is not to become an hotel, but to become a good inn. Cervantes, who, as itinerant tax-gatherer in Andalusia, was, like Don Quixote, a "pilgrim from inn to inn," wrote with feeling describing the "limited inn-dinner" or the ''accursed trestle-bed."" Anyone who will may suffer the same to-day and, what is more, enjoy it. 1 inns, if uncomfortable, are clean, and the characters of mine host and of his guests who gather round the great hearth are compensation for some minor discomforts, A sixteenth century humanist, travelling to Poreugal. recounts his experiences at an inn on the banks of the Tagus. ''What shall we have for supper, good hostess?''—'"There is nothing," she said. The luckless traveller. accustomed to the comfort and plenty of Flanders, resolved to act on the motto, Qui dort dine, and asked to be shown to his bed, but, "There is no bed," she said. At many Spanish inns to-day clean beds and good food are to be had.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.