I still held the portfolio under my arm, and on taking my seat again, while we rounded the hill which suddenly hid the city from my eyes, I drew out my pencil and set down a date. It is the first of the three, and the one which I call the Date of the Window.
At the end of several months, I again had an opportunity to leave the Capital for three or four days. I dusted my portfolio, tucked it under my arm, provided myself with a quire of paper, a half-dozen pencils and a few napoleons and, deploring the fact that the railroad was not yet finished, crowded myself into a public stage that I might journey in reverse order through the scenes of Tirso’s famous comedy _From Toledo to Madrid_.
Once installed in the historic city, I devoted myself to visiting again the spots which had most excited my interest on my former trip, and certain others which as yet I knew only by name.
Thus I let slip by, in long, solitary rambles among the most ancient quarters of the town, the greater part of the time which I could spare for my little artistic expedition, finding a veritable pleasure in losing myself in that confused labyrinth of blind lanes, narrow streets, dark passages and steep, impracticable heights.
One afternoon, the last that I might at that time remain in Toledo, after one of these long wanderings in unknown ways, I arrived--by what streets I can scarcely tell--at a great deserted square, apparently forgotten by the very inhabitants of the city and hidden away, as it were, in one of its most remote nooks.
The filth and the rubbish cast out in this square from time immemorial had identified themselves, if I may say so, with the earth in such a manner as to present the broken and mountainous aspect of a miniature Switzerland. On the hillocks and in the valleys formed by these irregularities were growing at their own will wild mallows of colossal proportions, circles of giant nettles, creeping tangles of white morning-glories, stretches of that nameless, common herb, small, fine and of a darkish green, and among these, swaying gently in the light breath of the air, overtopping like kings all the other parasitic plants, the no less poetic than vulgar yellow mustard, true flower of wastes and ruins.