to my old friend José Blanco's, the tobacconist,
in the street of the Seven Sorrows, I was
driven into a doorway by a great caravan,
such as Chaucer's pilgrims to Compostella
must have seen, and which has never improved
or altered one tittle since then. It was the
Galera bound from Malaga to Granada, about
which journey it would take some three days
or so.

And here for highly-civilised English
readers, impatient because the half-past three
express is five minutes too slow, let me stop
a moment at the roadside inn of an episode
briefly to describe the various means of transit
open to modern travellers in Spain. First
there is the correo, or mail-cart, which carries
the conductor, driver, and three or four
passengers. The correo travels six miles an
hour, stops hardly anywhere for meals—
tumbles, jolts, flounders, and wallops on—
charging you threepence a mile, and generally
compelling you to leave your luggage behind.
The correo is always full when you want a
place, is punctual to within four hours of
the specified time, and is a delightful,
fever-breeding, flea-haunted, leg-cramping,
bone-breaking conveyance, rather better than
an English dung-cart, and about as clean.
You never have room for five minutes together
to stretch your legs, and, to render ease
more impossible, the narrow space under the
seats is built up with sacks of chopped straw,
mule harness, pack-saddles, and lumbering
green-rinded melons. The rain pierces the
awning above your head, or the sun cuts
through it remorselessly. Through the open
door, that admits no air, the dust sifts in, as
from a restless pepper-castor, and all the
light that ought to reach you is blocked out
by the two men who sit on the front seat
with the driver. As for axles breaking and
horses falling, that is nothing; because you
can neither read, sleep, sit, nor stand in the
purgatory on wheels called in Spanish the
correo.

The diligencia is the diligence as it is
everywhere—ponderous, slow, stuffy and
behind time; but tolerably sure and safe. The
conductor is a good fellow, and the meals are
tolerable. Then, if you are clothed in bank
notes you can ride post with a carrier's
guide, or hire a cocle, or lolleras. A sort of
family-coach lugged by a drove of mules,
who crawl only thirty tedious miles a day. In
a city you can get your calesa or your painted
showman's tartana, sending on your luggage
by the strings of carriers' mules; but, ten to
one, if you go faster, you will fare worse, and
have to entrust your carcase to what has just
driven me into port—the GALERA. And what
is the Galera? It is a caravan drawn by six
pairs of oxen. It now drumbles past me with
its matted sides and market-cart awning,
"melancholy slow," laden with its patient,
shaken-down peasants, mothers, sucklings,
priests, and country ''bucks," smoking,
eating, talking, prosing sick, and sleeping.

Now, the galera is all very well, grinding
and tumbling Leviathan-like along the
knobbly streets of Barcelona or Malaga,
or even along the eight royal roads the
ill-used country boasts, which, however, are
all full of trap-holes, and where springs snap
and bones crack.

Taking a regretful look of pity and
astonishment at this mountain wagon toiling
along irresistible and slow as a land ship,
and smiling to express what I feel at the
stolid and contented lazy faces I meet, I push
on to José Blanco's.

"Ave, Maria Purissima!" says he to me.
"Bah! How hot it is! Impecado concebida!"

"Son of my soul!" I say, "may your
shadow never be less."

What cigars do I want to-day? He touches
the brown scented bundles. I smoke a Lopez,
thick as a flageolet, and finding its ash remain
in a white column tipped with crimson, I order
a box, and wander off to fresh latitudes,—
flaneur-born that I am. On my way to the
cathedral—which shuts for siesta just as
every other building does in Spain, where
even religion has its noon-day nap—I stop and
am amused at some smiths at work in an
angle of the open street opposite their shops,
making an iron bed: filing, hammering, and
slowly building up, with wise and thoughtful
violence, the quiet sleeping-place of future
generations. There are many gossips round
them, who wince when the workmen wince,
and smile when they smile, applaud a settling
and satisfactory blow, and condole at an
unsatisfactory one. But, what I want is, not to
look at these hammer-men, but to get some
Arquebusade for a bruised finger, at Monsieur
Jozeau's, the civil French chemist's, near
the custom-house orange-tubs. Monsieur
Jozeau is a good but talkative man, and I
dread his recapitulation of all the neat, new
novelties just arrived from Paris, I do
not want purgative lemonade, nor syrup of
flowers, Stramonium cigarettes, worm-seed,
cucumber cream, Racahout, or even the
Syrop de Framboise, or the Alexandrian
Haschisch.

I leave, for the Célestines of Paris, the
chloroform capsules for sea-sickness, and the
vinegar of the Four Robbers;—that curious
preservation against the plague, discovered
by four corpse robbers in the time of
some great French pestilence. Braving,
however, all the torments of French garrulity, I
stroll in, buy my Arquebusade, amuse my
picture-making eye with observing the red
pool of light that his gay window-bottle
on the opposite wall of the street, and which
I could fancy suddenly striking on the face
or hand of some wandering Cain of a
murderer, driving him to a passionate
confession of his guilt; which, of course (so my
story would go), a passing gend'arme watching
at an elbow of the street wall, hears and
acts upon.

A visit to the post-office, to read the list of