Mullins' travelogue of the old pilgrim routes to the shrine of St. James of Compostela, patron saint of Spain and first cousin to Jesus Christ, is larded with nostalgia for a bygone age of ""moral urgency"" and ""the creative strength of crude blind faith""; snatches of the history of Christianity in Western Europe; notes on the architecture of abbeys, churches, cathedrals, cloisters and convents; descriptions of a landscape dotted with sleepy villages and pretty towns and encounters with their simple inhabitants; personal accounts of picnics, parties and pelota matches the author and his wife enjoyed -- not to mention reports of a few aches and blisters. This potpourri has a particularly British genteel middle-cerebral ambience but lacks anything more to disengage the American traveler from his armchair.