The mosquitoes here were dreadful;
perpetually raising their little cavalry trumpets,
sounding the charge on me, and leaving
me in the morning red, sore, itching,
and swollen. I tried all sorts of ingenuities:
I made a strait-waistcoat of my nightgown,
and got Rousseau to come and button the
sleeves over my hands the last thing. I
made a Desdemona of myself, by covering
my face with a blood-red silk handkerchief,
which I really believe only attracted
them, like so much raw meat. I fondly
imagined that by keeping the candle alight
in the stuffy inner room, I should drive
the little wretches who dunned me for my
blood, away from me, to a fiery trap, and
their own destruction. Not I: they knew
that trick, and every other. They were
not going to leave a savoury man for an
unsavoury candle. They kept singing wake-
dirges round my mosquito-curtains; and woe
to me if in the hot struggles and turnings
of the night, I thrust a naked foot through
the white dusty-smelling net curtains into
the cool sea air that careered through the
room. They fastened on it in a clump,
and set to digging, like so many Californian
prospectors.  In the morning I found it
covered with red pustules, as if I had put my
foot into a solid spotted fever that some
previous traveller had left till called for.

Another horror of mine was the cock-
roaches, that haunt every Spanish inn. I had
seen them depicted by a morbid Spanish
painter in a convent that Murillo has adorned
in Seville, running about with hideous vivacity
over the skeleton of a bishop decorated with
a jewelled mitre and robes of cloth-of-gold
tissue. I remembered their prawn-like feelers,
their brown, shining, sharded bodies, their
countless legs, their shrimpy, loose, black
balls of eye, that protruded with a sort of
reptile malice.

For three nights after they ran about in my
dreams, I fancied myself devoting a long
and useful life to scrunching them. A day or
two of impunity made me regard them as
extinct animals, as gone with the dragon-goose
and the elephant-toad of Mr. Waterhouse
Hawkins at the Crystal Palace. One night,
alack, I entered hurriedly a lumber-room,
where my boxes were condemned to solitary
confinement. As I entered the place,
before the candle-flame had quite righted
itself, I had a general impression of a
scurry and dispersion of a cock-roach
parliament. Some (inch and half long) slipped
between the boards; others, behind ragged
flaps of the loathsome, diseased-looking,
colourless paper, that was pealing in a dirt
leprosy off the walls; others, inquiring,
yet timid, scuttled down chinks, then turned,
like lightning, and watched me, with their
filthy, pointed, prawn heads, with a sagacity
quite devilish. The quickness, size, eagerness,
and sense of these vermin, sent me
into horrid charnel-house dreams, and that
hideous picture seemed to fresco iteself on
the vile walls.

The man who goes to Spain with
cosmetics, powders, brushes, collar-boxes, and
such dandy paraphernalia, will be rather
astonished at the dirt and negligence of
Spanish inns; where there is plenty to eat,
if you bring it with you, and very good beds,
if you like the plain ground. Waiters with
black dresscoats, white waistcoats, and clerical
ties, you will not find. Spanish waiters are
spare, brown men, in linen-jackets, not
anxious to exert themselves, and not caring
for your personal admiration, because they
are made regular items in the bills. The
landlord is not a pleasant, smirking, port- wine
coloured man, with a bow-window stomach
thrown out in front; but a stiff Don, who
thinks he obliges you by taking you in at all.

There are no brisk, neat-handed chamber-maids,
but only an old duenna, who comes
for your washing things, calls herself the
"lavandera," just as you find the word in old
romances, and pretends to sweep the tiled
floor of your bed-room with a long skirmishing
broom made of slips of cane, and that
does not require stooping to.

The Café is not like the cosy saw-dusted
London tavern, with the snug fire and
talkative kettle, and the perpetual cries of
"Edward, pay one—chop and chop to follow
—two sausages well done;" but a quiet place,
with a few groups of smoking men sipping
coffee, and lighting cheroots at curious little
chafing-dishes with shaving-pot handles filled
with white ashes, that kindle as you breathe
and blow to a living scarlet that would make
a chilly salamander clap his hands.

RUSTIC TOWNSMEN.

THE City of London, after dark, is a dead
city. It dies every evening at seven o'clock,
and comes to life again at seven in the morning.
It goes out like a taper at the first puff
of the night wind, and is lighted again by the
morning sun. I say the City, and mean only
the City lawfully so called, which is contained
in the midst of the metropolis. Its soul is made
up of the souls that live and work in it. This
soul is carried out of its substance, piece-
meal, every evening in long, lumbering trains,
and is brought back bit by bit in the same
trains on the next morning. In plain words,
nobody sleeps in the City. In the day it is a
place of business, without an equal in the
universe; at night, except by a few house-
keepers and apprentices, it is almost utterly
forsaken; and, on Sundays, it is a void place
in which lonely policemen saunter up and
down the shady groves of brick, where also
faithful pastors pipe to half a dozen sheep
in sheepfolds built magnificently for important
flocks, and are left idle in the midst
of pasturages planned to satisfy a mighty
herd.

By the omnibuses labourers among the