seasonable addition to our party. After we set forward, the men behind followed us a little way, probably to ascertain our numbers; they then stood still; and in another quarter of an hour, they were no longer visible. The posada at Chirivel was almost as bad as the venta at Huetor; but being nearly independent of the larder of the posada, I both drank tea and supped comfortably, with that miserable substitute for a sea-coal fire--a brasero--under the table; but I had no talisman against the fleas, and was overjoyed to find myself free from their assaults, and on the road next morning. From Chirivel, the only road is the bed of a river, in which we travelled three leagues, till we reached Velez el Rubio. The banks of the stream, then almost dried up, are in many places precipitous; so that I had been truly told in Granada, that in wet weather it is impossible to travel to Murcia. The situation of Velez el Rubio is picturesque: a ruined castle looks down upon it, and the environs are tolerably well wooded; this improvement in the appearance of the country, continues only about a league and a half beyond the town, when every trace of cultivation is entirely lost; and a range of the most desolate hills I ever travelled through, stretches to the east; these are the hills that divide Granada from Murcia. The pass through them is twenty-two miles long; and the whole of this distance there is not a single human dwelling. It is not by a road, nor even by a path, but by the bed of a torrent that these mountains are traversed; and this bed, for the first eight miles, is not six feet wide, and is strewn with enormous rocks, which force the traveller to be a pedestrian. During the whole day, after entering these mountains, we met only one person; this was a Capuchin friar, driving his ass before him, laden with two large jars of oil, the gift of the good Catholics of Lorca, where he had been, to beg this luxury for the use of his convent at Velez el Rubio. Since there are no houses among these hills, it can scarcely be expected that there should be any cultivation; I did not see one rood of cultivated land, nor a single flock of any kind, not even a few goats. But this country, desolate as it is, has some charms of its own. Rosemary, sweet marjoram, thyme, lavender, and a thousand odoriferous and sweet smelling plants, fill the air with their fragrance, and by so pleasingly addressing one of the senses, withdraw the attention of another from the spectacle of barrenness. After ascending in the bed of one torrent two leagues, we reached the summit of the ridge, and then entered the channel of another stream, in which we descended three leagues to Puerto, our rendezvous for the night. Approaching this place, I observed several little boys herding goats, with only a shirt on, and that shirt a very ragged one. This, on the warm shores of Andalusia, or in the plain of Murcia, would excite little compassion; but here, scarcely out