nothing upon his arrival; for upon a road where there are no travellers, the innkeeper dare not trust to the appetites, or will, of those who arrive by the diligence; because if his meal should be rejected, he could find no other market for it. The country to the south of Lerma is a desert; indeed it is nothing better than a desert that stretches between the _Ebro_ and the _Douro_. I passed this latter river at _Aranda_; a small, wretched place, full of misery and rags; and afterwards traversed extensive woods of chestnut and ilex, which stretch three or four leagues to the foot of a low _sierra_, which is the natural boundary between Old and New Castile. Soon after entering this sierra, I passed through the most miserable village that I have seen in any part of Spain: it is quite impossible for one who has never seen the very lowest of the Spanish poor, to form the smallest conception of the general appearance of the inhabitants of this village. I saw between two and three hundred persons; and among these, there was not one, whose rags half covered his nakedness. Men and women were like bundles of ill-assorted shreds and patches of a hundred hues and sizes; and as for the children, I saw several entirely naked, and many that might as well have been without their tattered coverings. I threw a few biscuits among the children; and the eagerness with which they fought for, and devoured them, reminded me rather of young wolves than of human beings. The badness of the pavement, and the steepness of the street, made it necessary for the diligence to go slowly; and I profited by the delay to look into one or two of the miserable abodes of these unfortunate beings. I found a perfect unison between the dweller and his dwelling: I could not see one article of furniture; no table, no chair: a few large stones supplied the place of the latter; for the former there was no occasion; and something resembling a mattress upon the mud floor, was the bed of the family. Leaving this village, I noticed two stone pillars, and a wooden pole across, indicating that the proprietor possesses the power of life and death within his own domain. I forget the name of the grandee at whose door lies all this misery; but if the power of life and death be his, and if he cannot make the former more tolerable, it would be humanity to inflict the latter.