Alcalá de Guadaíra is a town containing a population of two thousand inhabitants, and standing on a high hilly spot to the northeast of Seville. The greatest part of the bread consumed in this city comes daily from Alcalá, where the abundant and placid stream of the Guadaíra, facilitates the construction of water-mills. Many of the inhabitants being bakers, and having no market but Seville, were under the necessity of repairing thither during the infection. It is not with us as in England, where every tradesman practically knows the advantages of the division of labour, and is at liberty, to consult his own convenience in the sale of his articles. The bakers, the butchers, the gardeners, and the farmers, are here obliged to sell in separate markets, where they generally spend the whole day waiting for customers. Owing to this regulation of the police, about sixty men, and double that number of mules, leave Alcalá every day with the dawn, and stand till the evening in two rows, inclosed with iron railings, at the _Plaza del Pan_. The constant communication with the people from all parts of the town, and so long an exposure to the atmosphere of an infected place, might have been supposed powerful enough to communicate the disease. We, certainly, were in daily apprehension of its appearance at Alcalá. So little, however, can we calculate the effects of unknown causes, that of the people that thus braved the contagion, only one, who passed the night in Seville, caught the disease and died. All the others, no less than the rest of the village, continued to enjoy the usual degree of health, which, probably owing to its airy situation, is excellent at all times. The daily accounts we received from our city, independent of the danger to which we believed ourselves exposed, were such as would cast a gloom over the most selfish and unfeeling. Superstition, however, as if the prospect had not been sufficiently dark and dismal, was busy among us, increasing the terrors which weighed down the minds of the people. Two brothers, both clergymen, wealthy, proud, conceited of the jargon they mistook for learning, and ambitious of power under the cloak of zeal, had, upon the first appearance of the fever, retreated to Alcalá, where they kept a country-house. Two more odious specimens of the pampered, thorough-bred, full-grown Spanish bigot, never appeared in the ranks of the clergy. The eldest, a dignitary of the church, was a selfish devotee, whose decided taste for good living, and mortal aversion to discomfort, had made him calculate with great nicety how, by an economy of pleasure in this world, he might secure a reasonable share of it in the next. But whatever degree of self-denial was necessary to keep him from gross misconduct, he amply repaid himself in the enjoyment of control over the consciences and conduct of others.