In a letter to this country he said, "What seems mere fiction and romance in other countries is matter of observation here, and in all that relates to manners Cervantes and Le Sage are historians; for when you have crossed the Pyrenees you have not only passed from one country and climate to another, but you have gone back a couple of centuries in your chronology, and find the people still in that kind of poetical existence which we have not only long since lost, but which we have long since ceased to credit on the reports of our ancestors." Although it would be interesting to linger over the passages dealing with Spain, it is perhaps better to turn to his account of leaving it, which he did under the most singular circumstances--namely, as one of a band of contrabandistas. Not that he wore a mask and filled his purse by robbing unoffending travelers; instead, he joined this party of accomplished smugglers, who used to carry on the business of smuggling dollars from Seville to Lisbon and bring back English goods in the same way. For eight days he was in their company, and he says, "I have seldom passed eight more interesting days, for by the very novelty and strangeness of everything--sleeping out every night but one, and then in the house of the chief of our band; dining under trees at noon; living on a footing of perfect equality and good-fellowship with people who are liable every day to be shot or hanged by the laws of their country; indeed, leading for a week as much of a vagabond life as if I were an Arab or a Mameluke,--I came soon to have some of the gay recklessness that marked the character of my companions." This certainly would be a curious episode in the life of any law-abiding citizen, and in Mr. Ticknor's case it was peculiarly astonishing, for his life, this week excepted, could certainly never be called, with any show of justice, "vagabond."