As at Seville, you find life here focussing in lane-like streets, closed to vehicles, and lined with cafés and casinos, among the finest I have seen in Spain. Here to an early hour of the morning the men of the city gossip in garrulous, intimate groups of nine and ten, all, as it seemed to me, talking together. The number of cigarettes smoked during the progress of these tremendous conversations must be stupendous. As you will see the same group meeting night after night, you wonder what there can be in the outwardly uneventful round of life of Malaga to supply topics for conversation. To an Englishman there is a mystery about this ability to talk for five or six hours about nothing at all. You will see the same thing in the dullest provincial towns in France and Italy--the same groups of stout, bald-headed citizens talking with frantic animation every evening. Their newspapers afford the slenderest mental pabulum--their contents could be dismissed in ten minutes--and the respectable gentlemen in question are never seen to read books. How then do they recruit their stock of ideas and find an inexhaustible stock of topics for conversation? [Illustration: MALAGA--THE GUADALMEDINA] Women are, of course, conspicuous by their absence. Here we have another illustration of the utterly false ideas Englishmen usually entertain concerning Latins. To judge from novels written fifty or even thirty years ago, John Bull appears to have regarded the foreigner with pitying contempt as a mere philanderer, always running after a petticoat; yet no one can be in Spain a fortnight without noticing the Spaniard's disinclination for female society, or at any rate how perfectly content he is without it. I do not fancy the ladies of Malaga care very much for society either, in our acceptation of the word. Looking out of the window appears to be their favourite recreation. They do not inherit the habit from the Moors, for that people, as I have said, were nearly all expelled at the Reconquest, and the town was resettled. All the Andalusian towns were wholly or in part emptied of their Mohammedan population when taken by the Christians, and repeopled with Castilians and others from Northern Spain. This fact is forgotten by those who recognize in every trait of the Andalusian a heritage from the Moor. We might as well think we derive our chief national characteristics from the Britons or the Normans.