The genuine Spanish town inn is called the _posada_, as being meant to mean, a house of _repose_ after the pains of travel. Strictly speaking, the keeper is only bound to provide lodging, salt, and the power of cooking whatever the traveller brings with him or can procure out of doors; and in this it diners from the _fonda_, in which meats and drinks are furnished. The _posada_ ought only to be compared to its type, the _khan_ of the East, and never to the inn of Europe. If foreigners, and especially Englishmen, would bear this in mind, they would save themselves a great deal of time, trouble, and disappointment, and not expose themselves by their loss of temper on the spot, or in their note-books. No Spaniard is ever put out at meeting with neither attention nor accommodation, although he maddens in a moment on other occasions at the slightest personal affront, for his blood boils without fire. He takes these things coolly, which colder-blooded foreigners seldom do. The native, like the Oriental, does not expect to find anything, and accordingly is never surprised at only getting what he brings with him. His surprise is reserved for those rare occasions when he finds anything actually ready, which he considers to be a godsend. As most travellers carry their provisions with them, the uncertainty of demand would prevent mine host from filling his larder with perishable commodities; and formerly, owing to absurd local privileges, he very often was not permitted to sell objects of consumption to travellers, because the lords or proprietors of the town or village had set up other shops, little monopolies of their own. These inconveniences sound worse on paper than in practice; for whenever laws are decidedly opposed to common sense and the public benefit, they are neutralized in practice; the means to elude them are soon discovered, and the innkeeper, if he has not the things by him himself, knows where to get them. On starting next day a sum is charged for lodging, service, and dressing the food: this is, called _el ruido de casa_, an indemnification to mine host for the _noise_, the disturbance, that the traveller is supposed to have created, which is the old Italian _incommodo de la casa_, the routing and inconveniencing of the house; and no word can be better chosen to express the varied and never-ceasing din of mules, muleteers, songs, dancing, and laughing, the dust, the _row_, which Spaniards, men as well as beasts, kick up. The English traveller, who will have to pay the most in purse and sleep for his _noise_, will often be the only quiet person in the house, and might claim indemnification for the injury done to his acoustic organs, on the principle of the Turkish soldier who forces his entertainer to pay him teeth-money, to compensate for the damage done to his molars and incisors from masticating indifferent rations. [Sidenote: SPANISH INNKEEPERS.]