Food for the mind must not be neglected. The travelling library, like companions, should be select and good; _libros y amigos pocos y buenos_. The duodecimo editions are the best, as a large heavy book kills horse, rider, and reader. Books are a matter of taste; some men like Bacon, others prefer Pickwick; stow away at all events a pocket edition of the Bible, Shakspere, and Don Quixote: and if the advice of dear Dr. Johnson be worth following, one of those books that can be taken in _the hand_, and to the fire-side. Martial, a grand authority on Spanish hand-books, recommended “such sized companions on a long journey.” Quartos and folios, said he, may be left at home in the book-case-- “Scrinia da magnis, _me manus una_ capit.” [Sidenote: THE BOTA.] Here also keep the passport, that indescribable nuisance and curse of continental travel, to which a free-born Briton never can get reconciled, and is apt to neglect, whereby he puts himself in the power of the worst and most troublesome people on earth. Passports in Spain now in some degree supply the Inquisition, and have been embittered by vexatious forms borrowed from bureaucratic France. [Sidenote: THE BOTA.] Having thus disposed of these matters on the front bow of his saddle, to which we always added a _bota_--the pocket-pistol of Hudibras--one word on this _Bota_, which is as necessary to the rider as a saddle to his horse. This article, so Asiatic and Spanish, is at once the bottle and the glass of the people of the Peninsula when on the road, and is perfectly unlike the vitreous crockery and pewter utensils of Great Britain. A Spanish woman would as soon think of going to church without her fan, or a Spanish man to a fair without his knife, as a traveller without his _bota_. Ours, the faithful, long-tried comforter of many a dry road, and honoured now like a relic, is hung up a votive offering to the Iberian Bacchus, as the mariners in Horace suspended their damp garments to the deity who had delivered them from the dangers of water. Its skin, now shrivelled with age and with fruitless longings for wine, is still redolent of the ruby fluid, whether the generous _Valdepeñas_ or the rich _vino de Toro_: and refreshing to our nostrils is even an occasional smell at its red-stained orifice. There the racy wine-perfume lingers, and brings water into the mouth, it may be into the eyelid. What a dream of Spanish odours, good, bad, and indifferent, is awakened by its well-known _borracha!_--what recollections, breathing the aroma of the balmy south, crowd in; of aromatic wastes, of leagues of thyme, whence Flora sends forth advertisements to her tiny bee-customer; of churches, all incense; of the goats and monks, long-bearded and odoriferous; of cities whose steam of garlic, ollas, oil, and tobacco rises up to the heavens, mingled with the thousand and one other continental sweets which assail a man’s nose, whether he lands at Calais