At nightfall after supper, a few hours are allowed on your part to steal whatever rest the _mayoral_ and certain _voltigeurs_, creeping and winged, will permit; the beds are plain and clean; sometimes the mattresses may be compared to sacks of walnuts, but there is no pillow so soft as fatigue; the beds are generally arranged in twos, threes, and fours, according to the size of the room. The traveller should immediately on arriving secure his, and see that it is comfortable, for those who neglect to get a good one must sleep in a bad. Generally speaking, by a little management, he may get a room to himself, or at least select his companions. There is, moreover, a real civility and politeness shown by all classes of Spaniards, on all occasions, towards strangers and ladies; and that even failing, a small tip, “_una gratificacioncita_,” given beforehand to the maid, or the waiter, seldom fails to smooth all difficulties. On these, as on all occasions in Spain, most things may be obtained by good humour, a smile, a joke, a proverb, a cigar, or a bribe, which, though last, is by no means the least resource, since it will be found to mollify the hardest heart and smooth the greatest difficulties, after civil speeches had been tried in vain, for _Dadivas quebrantan peñas, y entra sin barrenas_, gifts break rocks, and penetrate without gimlets; again, _Mas ablanda dinero que palabras de Caballero_, cash softens more than a gentleman’s palaver. The mode of driving in Spain, which is so unlike our way of handling the ribbons, will be described presently. Means of conveyance for those who cannot afford the diligence are provided by vehicles of more genuine Spanish nature and discomfort; they may be compared to the neat accommodation for man and beast which is doled out to third-class passengers by our monopolist railway kings, who have usurped her Majesty’s highway, and fleece her lieges by virtue of act of Parliament. First and foremost comes the _galera_, which fully justifies its name; and even those who have no value for their time or bones will, after a short trial of the rack and dislocation, exclaim,--“_que diable allais-je faire dans cette galère?_” These machines travel periodically from town to town, and form the chief public and carrier communication between most provincial cities; they are not much changed from that classical cart, the _rheda_, into which, as we read in Juvenal, the whole family of Fabricius was conveyed. In Spain these primitive locomotives have stood still in the general advance of this age of progress, and carry us back to our James I., and Fynes Moryson’s accounts of “carryers who have long covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from city to city; but this kind of journeying is so tedious, by reason they must take waggons very early and come very late to their innes, none but women and people of inferior condition used to travel in this sort.” So it is now in Spain. [Sidenote: CARRIAGES AND CARTS.]