rest of Spain, Estremadura was exposed to their frequent incursions; every flock and herd was liable to be carried off, every fruit-tree to be cut down, the farms burnt and crops destroyed; and in their retaliation the Christian knights were almost as fatal as the Arab horsemen. The country was never thoroughly peopled after the reconquest, and the sense of insecurity remained long after the cause of it had been removed. The laws of the Mesta and the emigration to the Americas (both Cortes and Pizarro were Extramenos) finished the work of depopulation, and left the province, as it has since remained, naturally one of the richest, actually one of the poorest in Spain. The products, besides those above mentioned, are cork, oak-bark and acorns for tanning, honey, nuts, and chestnuts. The bare plains of the Castiles are now the great corn-producing country of Spain. But they have little or nothing of the beauty and variety of cultivated land in other countries. There is no succession of crops, no mixed husbandry, no scattered farm-houses, neither tree nor fence to break the bare monotony. The hill-sides and mountains are given up to pasture, the plains to wheat and maize. The husbandmen live in villages, and ride out on donkeys in early morn to their distant fields, and return home at night. A sense of insecurity seems still to brood over the land, as if the peasant dared not trust himself outside the walls of village or town. Only at harvest-time, in the warm summer and autumn nights, he camps out among his crops, to thresh them on the spot, and bring the produce home, a habit which often produces fever and ague. Year after year the process is repeated; no improvement is ever made; if rain falls the harvest is plentiful--so plentiful sometimes that the lazy peasant will not reap his most distant fields, or procure new skins or barrels for the over-abundant wine, though with the extension of railways this evil is fast disappearing. There is hardly a greater contrast than between the habits of the Castilian peasants and those of the peasant-proprietors in the Basque provinces and in those of north and north-west. In the Basque provinces the farms are scattered all over the country, and travellers from other districts of Spain speak of the whole district as if it were one city. The farm-house stands in the midst of its grounds, with orchard, garden, trees and fences, meadow and corn-land round it. To Englishmen this description is almost a matter of course, and one must read the narrative of travellers from Castile fully to appreciate the force of the contrast. There is, moreover, no natural impediment whatever to a similar course of life in many districts of the Castiles. Barren and dreary as they look, the plains called the "Sierras de Campos," and some others, are watered by a kind of natural capillary attraction; dry as the surface appears, water is always to be found at a few inches below the surface, and the roots of the wheat and other