Four Months Afoot In Spain

Not the least of the virtues of the private schools of New York City is the length of their summer vacations. It was an evening late in May that I mounted to my lodgings in Hartley Hall, rollicksome with the information that I should soon be free from professional duties a full four months. Where I preferred to spend that term of freedom was easily decided. Except for one migratory "year off," I had not been so long outside a classroom since my fifth birthday; and it seemed fully as far back that I had begun to dream of tramping through Spain. If the desire had in earlier days battened on mere curiosity, it found more rational nourishment now in my hope of acquiring greater fluency in the Spanish tongue, the teaching of which, with other European languages, was the source of my livelihood.


There was one potent obstacle, however, to my jubilant planning. When I had set aside the smallest portion of my savings that could tide me over the first month of autumn, there was left a stark one hundred and seventy-two dollars. The briefest of mathematical calculations demonstrated that such a sum could cover but scantily one hundred and twenty days. Yet the blithesome project would not be put to rout by mere figures. I had been well schooled at least in the art of spending sparingly; with a long summer before me I was not averse to a bit of adventure, even the adventure of falling penniless in foreign lands.