Elche, our first stopping-place, famous in its way, is very often described and compared to half-a-dozen localities in Asia and Africa. I also will venture on a comparison, and say that from certain points of view it reminded me of Ismailia. It is completely surrounded by magnificent date-palms, the number of which a French author estimates at 80,000. In the shade of the avenues formed by these majestic trees flourish the laurel, the rose, and the geranium; beyond extend crops of lucerne and wheat, watered by the carefully regulated Vinalapó. For all the shade dispersed by the palms, Elche merits its sobriquet, "the frying-pan"! The temperature completes the resemblance with Africa. From the summit of the hill on which it is built, the town is seen to be situated in a real oasis. Beyond the outer ring of cultivation extends a desert as white and as saline as that which borders the Suez Canal. The eye rests lovingly on the not far distant sea. Elche makes an agreeable impression on most travellers. Gustave Doré has left us his impressions of it--over-imaginative as usual. Mr. Frank Barrett, that entertaining novelist, introduces the town into English fiction. In Spain it is not more celebrated for its palms (which are exported for religious uses) than for its Passion or Mystery Play, the only one of the kind in the kingdom. This institution is explained by the following legend. On the night of December 29, 1370, a mounted coastguard named Francisco Cantó, while patrolling the shore, encountered a man seated on a huge coffer. This stranger entreated the guard to carry his burden to Elche, and to deposit it at the first house where he saw a light, and having obtained his reluctant consent, abruptly disappeared. Cantó, in accordance with the mysterious man's instructions, left the chest at the Hermitage of San Sebastian. On opening it, it was found to contain an image of the Virgin and the words and music of the play as now performed. The image was regarded as miraculous, and resisted all attempts to remove it from the hermitage. It was not my good fortune to see the play, which takes place every year in the Iglesia Mayor, transformed for the purpose into a theatre. The representation lasts two days, the subject being the Assumption of the Virgin. The words, in the old Valencian dialect, are wedded to old Gregorian music. I understand that with a naïveté characteristic of medieval institutions, the Supreme Being Himself is personified on the stage. [Illustration: ELCHE--A STREET] A spectacle equally curious but not so picturesque is the daily sale of water, which takes place here as at Lorca, but with official calm and with none of the excitement to be remarked at the latter place.