The country _Parador_, _Meson_, _Posada_, and _Venta_, call it how you will, is the Roman stabulum, whose original intention was the housing of cattle, while the accommodation of travellers was secondary, and so it is in Spain to this day. The accommodation for the _beast_ is excellent; cool roomy stables, ample mangers, a never-failing supply of fodder and water, every comfort and luxury which the animal is capable of enjoying, is ready on the spot; as regards _man_, it is just the reverse; he must forage abroad for anything he may want. Only a small part of the barn is allotted him, and then he is lodged among the brutes below, or among the trusses and sacks of their food in the lofts above. He finds, in spite of all this, that if he asks the owner what he has got, he will be told that “there is everything,” _hay de todo_, just as the rogue of a _ventero_ informed Sancho Panza, that his empty larder contained all the birds of the air, all the beasts of the earth, all the fishes of the sea,--a Spanish magnificence of promise, which, when reduced to plain English, too often means, as in that case, there is everything that you have brought with you. This especially occurs in the _ventas_ of the out-of-the-way and rarely-visited districts, which, however empty their larders, are full of the spirit of Don Quixote to the brim; and the everyday occurrences in them are so strange, and one’s life is so dramatic, that there is much difficulty in “realising,” as the Americans say; all is so like being in a dream or at a play, that one scarcely can believe it to be actually taking place, and true. The man of the note-book and the artist almost forget that there is nothing to eat; meanwhile all this food for the mind and portfolio, all this local colour and oddness, is lost upon your Spanish companion, if he be one of the better classes: he is ashamed, where you are enchanted; he blushes at the sad want of civilization, clean table-cloth, and beefsteaks, and perhaps he is right: at all events, while you are raving about the Goths, Moors, and this lifting up the curtain of two thousand years ago, he is thinking of Mivart’s; and when you quote Martial, he and the ventero set you down as talking nonsense, and stark staring mad; nay, a Spanish gentleman is often affronted, and suspects, from the impossibility to him, that such things can be objects of real admiration, that you are laughing at him in your sleeve, and considering his country as Roman, African, or in a word, as un-European, which is what he particularly dislikes and resents.