The founding of this most unique and fascinating Museum in 1896 was due to the suggestion and energy of Señor Casto Sampedro, who has not only devoted endless time to its arrangement, but has published with the minutest care, in the local _Archæological Journal_, all the inscriptions it contains as well as those from the local churches. Señor Sampedro is a lawyer by profession, but his office is a veritable curiosity-shop, filled with antiques of every class and description: he is also an epigraphist, highly skilled in deciphering ancient documents. When a manuscript gives him any trouble, he pins it on his office wall, and looks at it at intervals during his work, sometimes for days together, before the correct meaning occurs to him. Señor Castro was also the founder of the Pontevedra Archæological Society. We next visited the church of the Franciscan monastery. This edifice is built in the shape of a Latin cross, with one very wide nave and a wide transept; at the head of the nave are three Gothic apses, a large one the width of the nave, and a smaller one on either side. The apses have recently been restored, and the lancet windows which had been bricked up are now filled with coloured glass from the manufactory at Leon. The transept was begun in the fifteenth century, but the rest of the church, with the exception of the chapels, dates from the middle of the thirteenth. The apses have fan vaults, and are of the first period of Gothic art, very similar to those of Santo Domingo. The side chapels are filled with the sumptuous tombs of wealthy families of the vicinity. The table of the chief altar is a great stone slab, seventeen feet long and three wide; it is thought to date from the foundation of the edifice. On one of the lateral altars I noted a black-faced statue of St. Benedict of Palermo. Two pairs of sarcophagi at the foot of the steps leading to the chief altar had the recumbent effigies of two interesting couples; their length is about seven feet. One on the right is thought to be a famous admiral of the fourteenth century, the legendary Chariño. The feet of all these effigies are crossed, their heads rest upon stone pillows, while the top of each sarcophagus represents a couch. The inscription on the tomb thought to be that of Chariño has been the subject of considerable discussion in books and pamphlets. Payo Gomez Chariño was the admiral who, at the head of a fleet composed of twenty-seven ships from Pontevedra and thirteen from Noya, broke and burned the famous bridge over the Guadalquivir [Illustration: PART OF THE MUSEUM OF ARCHÆOLOGY AT PONTEVEDRA] [Illustration: TOMB OF AN AMBASSADOR TO TAMERLANE IN THE MUSEUM OF SANTO DOMINGO] near Seville, _Puente de Triana_, which, being the key to the Moorish dominion of that part of the country, enabled Ferdinand III., to take the city.