It has a mixed race of inhabitants. It would not be strange if it had a mixed government also. Successive tides of people have swept over it, and the vestiges of all are left on the surface of the nation. Very little, indeed, is known of the days when the Iberians from Caucasus, and the Celts from Gaul, were the rude settlers of Spain; but the traces are more plain of the Phœnicians, who came here 1500 years before the birth of Jesus, and founded Cadiz and Malaga, and Cordova and Seville. In the year 218 before Christ the Romans came, and, of course, conquered all Spain, and reigned here just six centuries. Then came the Goths, sweeping the Romans out of Spain as they crushed Rome in Italy. And the Goths ruled Spain precisely 300 years. Then came the Moors, and, in two pitched battles, smote the Gothic Christian power to the earth; and, like a hurricane from the African coast, rushed up from the south, and never stayed its destructive course till the crescent had supplanted the cross on every tower in Spain. The Moors were lords of Spain just seven centuries. Gradually the crescent waned, as the Catholic Christian kings recovered strength, until St. Ferdinand captured Cordova, in 1235, and Ferdinand and Isabella completed the work at Granada, on the third day of the year 1492, and the last of the Moorish kings fled from the Alhambra. CHAPTER II. OUT OF FRANCE INTO SPAIN—THE BASQUE PROVINCES. AWAY down in the south-west corner of France, on the Bay of Biscay, was a hamlet on a rock-bound coast, which has of late years suddenly sprung into the notice of the world. The sunshine of imperial favor ripened the modest bud of a humble village into a flower of remarkable beauty. What was a short time since quite unknown, is now the fashionable watering-place of France. Selected by the late Emperor as his autumnal resort, he built a handsome chateau, and named it _Eugénie_, and thus made the fortune of Biarritz.