Artes—where art starves in the old
suppressed Capucin convent—where Essex
(who had then his head very tight on) had
his victorious quarters, and where much
Canary was drunk, and many hearty English
oaths were sworn.

It is in the Plaza de Mina, once the
garden convent, where monks once tended their
little grave-plots of gardens between the
buttresses, where the great dragon-trees and the
celebrated palm grove once stood, and where
now the Murillo children gnaw at melons,
and wrestle, and gamble with buttons;
using saints' names for adjurations. It is in
the hospital, where those seven men who were
stabbed the week I was there, turn groaning
on their pallets, and renew their quarrels from
bed to bed, till a bandage strains and breaks,
and, with a gush of blood, the wailing thief, a
curse on his pale lips, falls back and dies: an
occasion seized by that stalwart black curly
headed wretch with no nose and ulcerous
lips, to utter the appropriate proverb of his
country, "When one door is shut, another is
open;"  by which he means, that the next
birth in Cadiz will make up for the last
death. Is not that hard, rattlesnake laugh
hideous, that runs down the line of sick
men's beds!

"Have you always this great number of
knife cases?" I said, to the hard-faced doctor,
who paced with me up the long
hospital corridor, down which the soft sea air of
Cadiz seemed to flow like an invisible and
subtle liquid.

"Hombre! no; but last week the Solano
wind was blowing: that sent up the mercury
ball in a white thread Caramba six degrees
in one night. The cursed dry heat poisoned
the city, and drove the hot-bloods mad. I
was up all last night, looking at knife-cuts.
Hombre! You should have seen some of
them. You know the first slice in a shoulder
of mutton. Very well, then. By the bye,
have you eaten yet of any of our famous
gilt head fish with tomato sauce? It is a
meal fit for the Pope."

If you really want to see and feel the
extreme animal misery and poverty of Spanish
low life, go to the great yellow-ochre Doric
Casa de Misericordia, where one thousand
beggars noddle their beards daily over their
messes of smoking soup. There you will see
every note in the long gamut and keyboard
of poverty, from the robust fisherman, who
seems hammered out of steel, to the little old
man shrivelled and burnt up by the sun till
he looks like an Indian idol hewn out of a
black-red mahogany log. There, too, are
those special Spanish children, with
ape-foreheads, and claws for arms, with a
vacant idiot-knavery twinkling in their black
beads of eyes. Spain once had its paladins
and champions: its choppers-off of Moorish
heads, and cleavers of Moorish hearts; but
now it is peopled by padded, white-livered
officers, intriguing in miserable little plots to
subvert viler men than themselves; and
atheistic priests, who sneer behind the altar
at the dolls they play and juggle with.

NEW PUPPETS FOR OLD ONES.

I have cried out, in my time, pretty loudly
against adulterations and shams; but then
the shams and adulterations have always
been in a different trade from my own. It
is not without a struggle that I denounce the
obsolete puppets used in my own craft; but
it is time that their fluttering rags should be
given to the winds.

First, there is the miser;— a pure creation
of fancy;—an old and faithful puppet, who
has amused the crowd for many centuries,
though he is like nothing in the known
world. I never saw his living model, nor any
authentic account of its past existence; but
a certain school of art required such a
puppet, and he was dressed up to fill the
vacant place. We gave him long, grey hair,
sharp features, and eager eyes; we made
him very thin, and we caused him to have a
nervous twitching of the hands. We raised
our patchwork idol in the market-place, and
we laughed with pity and scorn at the number
of its worshippers. We told him to hide
his money in coal-cellars and in dust-bins;
we told him to visit his store with extreme
caution in the dead of night; and we told
him to howl like a dog when he fancied that
his secret was discovered. All these things
he faithfully did, not wisely, but too well;
and those who looked upon him thought that
avarice stood before them. No one seemed
to inquire why his face was so dirty, when
water and comfort were so cheap; or where
he got the guinea (as he never appeared to
work) which he was always adding to his
store. No one ever doubted his
acknowledged powers of calcualtion, though they
saw him losing interest on his capital every
hour, by hiding a small fortune in a summer-
house, or a sewer.

By adding a little more dirt to his face,
and making a very slight alteration in his
dress, we transformed him at once to a
bone-picker; and no one seemed to be aware that
the same puppet still moved before their
eyes. Again, when we cause him to spend
his money in pictures and statues, and to
gloat over these things instead of the cash
which had bought them, we suceeded in
deceiving ourselves, and we fully believed
that the miser-puppet had given place to the
enlightened patron of art.

All this time the real miser has been
walking about the great world, unnoticed
and undepicted. Sometimes he takes the
form of a small fundholder, living in an
inaccessible lodging, upon a very small
portion of his annual dividends. His face is not
dirty; nor are his clothes ragged; for he
finds it more profitable to be decent, like
his fellow-men. He is not thin, but plump;