While here we looked about for some specimens of the famous blades, which have made Toledo as celebrated as Damascus itself in this line. But we found nothing worth seeing. The manufactory of arms is outside of the town, and has no reputation beyond that of others in Spain. England or Connecticut will furnish as perfect a sword to-day as Toledo. Yet this is only another, and a very striking illustration of what Spain is, compared with what Spain was. As far back as under the Romans, Toledo had a character for the perfection of its weapons of steel. The Toledo blade has been a proverb for temper ever since. The idea has prevailed, and the workers in metals in Toledo have not been unwilling to encourage it, that the waters of the river Tagus have virtues to impart peculiar firmness to the steel that is cooled in them. The manufacturers, of course, have long been constituted into a guild, or corporation, and the secrets of the trade preserved with care. So long ago as in the ninth century Abdur-rhaman II. gave a great impulse to the art in Toledo, and its fame was spread still wider. A thousand years have rolled away since that time, and now, in the nineteenth century, they do not make as good weapons as they did then. In the museum at Madrid we saw the splendid swords which the famous warriors of Spain have worn, and, in the saloon of the Director of the Generaliffe, in Granada, the identical sword of Boabdil, the last of the Moorish kings; but they make no such steel now. Indeed, the steel they use is imported from England, just as they keep up the stock of horses and cattle and sheep, by importations from other countries. It is very probable that long, thin blades, that may be curled up like a ribbon, can be produced in China, or Persia, or Sheffield, as well as here. The men of Milan and Florence made as good swords as these. The use of fire-arms naturally diminishes the value of a sword as a weapon of war. Spanish people do not go CRAZY! Now and then there is a lunatic in Spain, but, as compared with the United States, or England, or France, the Spanish people manage to keep what wits they have. Just outside of Toledo there is a lunatic asylum. It is the successor of the one that Don Quixote ought to have been kept in, and which is mentioned in that knight-errant’s biography, the first work of fiction that I ever perused, and which then, in childhood, fired me with a desire to visit Spain. Don Quixote was crazy; and there may be thousands crazy whom the world do not reckon so.