Terms, with Vitles, is 9 shilings a wk, wich is
verry resonebel, has Me & my Wif & famerly wd.
make you quite At Home.

Your obt. Servant,
E. O'LEARY.
P.S.—We have No Fles, and there is a very nice
publick acros the Way, with Skitles and a Fre &
Ecey twise a week. E. O'L.

DREAMING.

I WANDER'D through the summer fields
    All in the blue and golden morn,
And like CHRIST'S followers of old,
    I pluck'd the ears of corn.

High up a lark sung rapturous hymns,
    Low down, among the rustling stems,
His brown mate listen'd, and the dew
    Set round her nest with gems.

I laid me down and dreamt, and dreamt
    Of summer mornings in the land
Where you and I, dear love, went forth
    Each morning, hand in hand.

I thought athwart the tremulous tears
    I saw your blue eyes gleaming, sweet,
Through golden locks: alas! 'twas but
    The cornflowers 'mid the wheat!

SPANISH DINNERS.

IT may be interesting to uneasy philologists
to know that Ham settled in Spain.
It was the splendour of the pork brought
that great patriarch to Spain; at least, so
the great Himmelbogen thinks. Vide chapter
thirty, section ten, Leipsic edition, sixteen
hundred and four.

A certain dead traveller speaking (when
alive) of Estremadura, the country of
aromatic sheep-walks and acorn-eating swine-
herds, where the locust is indigenous, and in
summer the air is musical with the soft
cooing of the Barbary pigeon, says, with
epicurean exultation, "Montanches (Snakes
Cliff), snug in its saucer of hills, is the
capital of the pork world." You approach
the place by an old Roman road covered
with cistuses and with huge trees growing
out of the pavement, that leads from Merida
to Salamanca, and is marked by Roman mile-
stone columns. The Duke de Arcos used to
feed his pigs here on vipers, on which they
marvellously fattened. Here the Duke de Saint
Simon, that king of memoir writing, ate and
praised the little vermilion hams, with the
admirable perfume and the gout so exquisite
and so refreshing. The fat is like melted topaz.
The flavour defies language. The Montanches
hams surpass the sweet ham of the
Alpujarras, the bacon of Galicia, and the chorizos
of Tique. Now the fact is, the Spaniards
being spare livers and rough travellers, like
bacon as a travelling portable food. It suits
the burning climate, because it will keep and
is always ready to be cooked. It ranks with
the salt codfish as a national food. They
bring you bacon in the Alpujarras that is
scarcely pickled at all, but preserved by hanging
up in the snow—a kind of food the traveller
will probably remember when the kiln-like
scorched mountains and purple defiles are long
forgotten; for the human stomach has a fine
memory. I, myself, have forgotten a thousand
acts and looks that I should have printed and
burnt in on the red-leaved tablets of my heart;
but shall I ever forget the tender pink of those
thin ham slices Dolores cut for me at the
Alhama inn, after my hard day's riding, when
I dreaded they would slit up some old pack
saddle, fry it in black grease, and call it
bacon? Shall I ever forget the curdy snow
whiteness of the outside fat, and the soft
cream colour of its inner shadings? In the
midst of the hard fare of Spain, how it
made me long for the flesh-pots of the
Club kitchen, and how it made my eyes
water recalling to me in a dream that night
one of those unctuous London eating-houses,
where a greasy stream trickles oozily down
the window glass, where the soup vapour
gushing up the grating, is strong enough to
feed a Yorkshire school with, and where the
curious eye, looking through the door,
distinguishes a comely buxom maiden armed
with a perfect scimetar of a knife, who must
be Judith, and a huge sultan of a man in
white with a conical nightcap on, who must be
the fat Holofernes, on whom Judith is about
to operate; though she is at present only
experimenting horizontally on a quivering
round of beef. I awoke the next morning
hungry from that sumptuous and stimulating
dream, but I never saw that ham again:
not to me, wanderer from the far west (W.C.
district of the metropolis), was it any more
given with fond eyes to see that precious and
only too transitorily beheld ham. My breakfast
was a light and inadequate one of a
butterless roll and four unripe prickly pears.
If at that moment I could have met with
one of those "Bath chaps" they advertise in
London windows, it would have been the
worse for the chap. I rode off lighting a
cigar and parodying Tom Moore, "I never
loved a tender ham, &c." That ham and
I were separated never to meet again. I
always pitied the Moors because they never
could eat ham or drink sherry, the two best
things Spain—that lost country, the dunghill
of dead greatness—produces; and which,
while the Cid and the great Captain,
Columbus and Isabella, Quevedo and Cervantes,
Calderon and De Vega have passed into
road-dust, alone remain unchanged and
unchangeable—objects for gastronomic
pilgrimage.

If ever I undertook, what I think some day
of undertaking, an epicure's journey in search
of pictures and dinners, I will first go to
Dunstable for its huge larks, and to York
for its clotted snow cheeses; to Finnan for