But take it summer and winter through, and in the last nine years it has rained only 262 times, or thirty-nine times in the course of each year: and think of it, O ye dwellers in London, or Paris, or New York, it has been foggy or misty but sixteen days in three times three years! And this bright, beautiful atmosphere gives a blue sky so deep and pure, that it would take a poet of more than average fancy power to invent a firmament of superior glory, or to find a sunset in Greece or Italy to be mentioned in the same day with the gorgeous splendors that clothe the skies of Southern Spain at shut of day. If you have consumption, or bronchitis, or any malady that is working mischief with your breathing apparatus, do not be governed, nor even guided, by the hasty generalizations of a man who writes from what he sees and hears in a tour for health and pleasure through half a dozen countries in the course of a season. The most that he can tell you is that such a climate as this is said to be excellent for those who have consumption already, and is likely to engender it where it is not; and if you cannot reconcile those two sayings of the books and the people, it is well enough to know that a sickly plant may be saved by being cared for in a hot-house, that might have been made to droop if taken in when it was in healthful vigor. Dr. Lee, whose opinion is of great weight, regards the climate of Madeira, Pau, or Pisa better than that of Malaga, for incipient tubercular disease, in persons of an excitable habit. And so much caution is to be used in deciding upon the means to be used for saving life by change of clime, that I would not write a line on this subject if I supposed that any one would be foolish enough to make a voyage on the strength of it. When a miserly client attempted to get an opinion out of a lawyer by asking him at dinner, “What would you advise me to do in such and such a case?” the lawyer answered, “I should think the best thing you could do would be to take advice.” And this is what I advise. No finer grapes than those of Malaga do we enjoy at home in the winter season, and the trade in raisins is enormous. We have been familiar with a raisin-box, but it was something quite novel to see extensive factories making nothing else but these rude little cases, all to be used for packing raisins. The raisin stores or depots where the boxes are waiting to be exported were so vast as to astonish me, but when one thinks of the extent to which they are distributed throughout the civilized world, it is only wonderful that the trade is not far greater. The country around is flowing with wine and oil. It might easily be made to yield cotton and sugar enough to supply the market of Europe. But it is in _Spain_, and nothing thrives in Spain but Romanism and its sister.