the gentry, where the _gracioso_ or _wit_ of the company, is expected to promote some practical joke when mischief is rife among the guests. The word _culebra_, for instance, is the signal for putting out the lights, and laying about with the first thing that comes to hand, as if trying to kill the _snake_, which is the pretended cause of the alarm. The stomachs of the party are, on other occasions, tried with a raw hare or kid, of which no one dares refuse to eat his share: and it is by no means uncommon to propose the alternative of losing a tooth, or paying a fine. The relations of the young man whose pedigree was to be examined by my friend, made it a point to entertain us, by rotation, every night with a dance. At these parties there was no music but a guitar, and some male and female voices. Two or four couples stood up for _seguidillas_, a national dance, not unlike the _fandango_, which was, not long since, modified into the _bolero_, by a dancing-master of that name, a native of the province of Murcia, from which it was originally called _Seguidillas Murcianas_. The dancers, rattling their castanets, move at the sound of a single voice, which sings couplets of four verses, with a burthen of three, accompanied by musical chords that, combining the six strings of the guitar into harmony, are incessantly struck with the nails of the right hand. The singers relieve each other, every one using different words to the same tune. The subject of these popular compositions, of which a copious, though not very elegant collection is preserved in the memory of the lower classes, is love; and they are generally appropriate to the sex of the singers. The illumination of the room consisted of a _candíl_--a rude lamp of cast-iron, hung up by a hook on an upright piece of wood fixed on a three-footed stool, the whole of plain deal. Some of the ladies wore their _mantillas_ crossed upon the chin so as to conceal their features. A woman in this garb is called _tapada_; and the practice of that disguise, which was very common under the Austrian dynasty, is still preserved by a few females in some of our country-towns. I have seen them at Osuna and El Arahal, covered from head to foot with a black woollen veil falling on both sides of the face, and crossed so closely before it that nothing could be perceived but the gleaming of the right eye placed just behind the aperture. Our old dramatic writers found in the _tapadas_ an inexhaustible resource for their plots. As the laws of honour protected a veiled lady from the intrusions of curiosity, jealousy was thus perpetually mocked by the very objects that were the main source of its alarms.