It was a good opportunity to learn something of the life of these people, who form, after all, the great mass of any nation, and the part of the people with whom every true heart is in sympathy. The rich and the gay, the fashionable people who throng in cities, can live as they please. The poor, who live from hand to mouth, and cannot choose for themselves, but must live as they can, these are the people in every country whose condition we want to inquire into; and when we have learned of their state, we know what their country is. It is the average of human comfort that we want to get at. And it is a real help towards one’s satisfaction with the condition of a people to know that it does not take a vast amount of the good things of this life to make one happy, if he has never had any thing more or better than the little he has been contented with. These Andalusians work on the farms of large proprietors, and get six to ten cents a day and their food, when they are working by the season. This sounds small. The wages of laboring men who find themselves, and who work by the day, will average forty or fifty cents a day. To know what such pay is worth we must know how they live, and what it costs to buy the food they have. Their food is chiefly soup of bacon oil and vegetables, with bread and fruit. They take a kettle of this thick soup, more like a pudding than a soup, to the fields with them; and day after day, year in and year out, eat substantially the same thing. And this food costs the peasants a very little more than nothing. The ground is easily worked, the climate is so favorable to growth and land so abundant, that what can be raised for food is almost as accessible to the poor as if vegetables were spontaneous and free to everybody. So it is that these _poor_ people are quite as well off, as to the mere physical comforts of life, as those who get one, two, and five dollars a day in other lands, and have to pay so much for food and lodgings as to be sorely puzzled to do what a cat often tries to do,—make both ends meet. These Spanish peasants appear to be lively, intelligent, and wide-awake. They give a reason for doing any thing, when they are asked; and that is more than the Irish or English peasantry can do at home, or in the land of the soaring eagle. Except in Russia, there is not a people on the continent of Europe that appear more stolid and unthoughtful, more like mere cattle or machines, than the farm peasantry of merry England. This may be in appearance only; but the truth is that you can get more out of an ignorant laborer on the continent of Europe, whose language you do not more than half understand, than out of an English farm hand who is supposed to speak English.