Then, when the heavens and earth are on fire, and the sun drinks up rivers at one draught, when one burnt sienna tone pervades the tawny ground, and the green herb is shrivelled up into black gunpowder, and the rare pale ashy olive-trees are blanched into the livery of the desert; then, when the heat and harshness make even the salamander muleteers swear doubly as they toil along like demons in an ignited salitrose dust--then, indeed, will an Englishman discover that he is made of the same material, only drier, and learn to estimate water; but a good thirst is too serious an evil, too bordering on suffering, to be made, like an appetite, a matter of congratulation; for when all fluids evaporate, and the blood thickens into currant jelly, and the nerves tighten up into the catgut of an overstrung fiddle, getting attuned to the porcupinal irritability of the tension of the mind, how the parched soul sighs for the comfort of a Scotch mist, and fondly turns back to the uvula-relaxing damps of Devon!--then, in the blackhole-like thirst of the wilderness, every mummy hag rushing from a reed hut, with a porous cup of brackish water, is changed by the mirage into a Hebe, bearing the nectar of the immortals; then how one longs for the most wretched _Venta_, which heat and thirst convert into the Clarendon, since in it at least will be found water and shade, and an escape from the god of fire! Well may Spanish historians boast, that his orb at the creation first shone over Toledo, and never since has set on the dominions of the great king, who, as we are assured by Señor Berni, “has the sun for his hat,”--_tiene al sol por su sombrero_; but humbler mortals who are not grandees of this solar system, and to whom a _coup de soleil_ is neither a joke nor a metaphor, should stow away non-conductors of heat in the crown of their beavers. Thus Apollo himself preserved us. And oh! ye our fair readers, who chance to run such risks, and value complexion, take for heaven’s sake a parasol and an _Alcarraza_. [Sidenote: SPANISH WATER-SELLERS.]