I must now acquaint you with the rules of the Roman Catholic fast, which all persons above the age of one-and-twenty, are bound to observe during Lent, Sundays excepted. One meal alone, from which flesh, eggs, milk, and all its preparations, such as cheese and butter, called _Lacticinia_, are excluded, is allowed on a fast day. It is under this severe form that your English and Irish Catholics are bound to keep their Lent. But we Spaniards are the darlings of our Mother Church of Rome, and enjoy most valuable privileges. The _Bull of the Crusade_, in the first place, dispenses with our abstinence from eggs and milk. Besides throwing open the hen-house and dairy, the said Bull unlocks the treasure of laid-up merits, of which the Pope keeps the key, and thus we are refreshed both in body and soul, at the trifling cost of about three-pence a-year. Yet we should have been compelled to live for forty days on your Newfoundland fish--not a savoury food in these hot countries--had it not been for a new kind of hostilities which our Government, in concert with the Pope, devised against England, I believe during the siege of Gibraltar. By allowing the Spaniards to eat meat four days in the Lent weeks, it was proposed to diminish the profits which Great Britain derives from the exportation of dried fish. We had accordingly another privilege, under the title of _Flesh-Bull_, at the same moderate price as the former. This additional revenue was found too considerable to be relinquished on the restoration of peace; and the Pope, who has a share in it, soon discovered that the weakness of our constitutions requires more solid nutriment than the dry chips of the Newfoundland fish can afford. The _Bull of the Crusade_ is proclaimed, every year before Lent, by the sound of kettle-drums and trumpets. As no one can enjoy the privileges expressed in these papal rescripts without possessing a printed copy thereof, wherein the name of the owner is inserted; there is a house at Seville with a printing-office, by far the most extensive in Andalusia, where, at the expense of Government, these Bulls are reprinted every year, both for Spain and Spanish America. Now, it has been wisely arranged that, on the day of the yearly publication, copies for the preceding twelvemonth shall become absolutely stale and unprofitable; a measure which produces a most prodigious hurry to obtain new Bulls, in all who wish well to their souls and do not quite overlook the ease and comfort of their stomachs.