I should not have spoken, had I foreseen one consequence of my words. The German snatched the reins of conversation out of our hands, and dashed off at full speed, trampling France and her ruler under his feet. At the first pause, I said to him, in German: "Pray don't be so violent in your expressions,--the gentleman beside me is a naval officer." But he answered: "I don't care,--I must speak my mind, which I could not do in Paris. France has been the curse of Spain, as well as of all Europe, and there will be no peace until we put a stop to her pretensions!" Thereupon he said the same thing to the company; but the Spaniards were too politic to acquiesce openly. The officer replied, "France has not injured Spain, but, on the contrary, has protected her!" and he evidently had not the slightest suspicion that there was anything offensive in his words. The Spaniards still remained silent, but another expression came into their eyes. It was time to change the subject; so the principle of non-intervention, in its fullest, most literal sense, was proposed and accepted. A grave Majorcan gentleman distributed cigars; his daughter, with her soft, melodious voice, was oil to the troubled waters, and before midnight we were all equally courteous and cosmopolitan. Of the four ensuing hours I can give no account. Neither asleep nor awake, hearing with closed eyes, or seeing with half-closed senses, one can never afterwards distinguish between what is seen and what is dreamed. This is a state in which the body may possibly obtain some rest, but the mind becomes inexpressibly fatigued. One's memory of it is a blurred sketch, a faded daguerreotype. I welcomed that hour when "The wind blows cold While the morning doth unfold," for it blew away this film, which usurped the place of the blessed mantle of sleep. Chill, even here in African Spain, where the pale pearl of the dawn foretold a burning noon, and where, in May, the harvests were already reaped, the morning brightened; but we were near the end of the journey. At sunrise, the towers of Giron stood fast and firm over the misty level of the shimmering olive-groves; then the huge dull mass of the cathedral, the walls and bastions of the hill-forts, which resisted a siege of seven months during the Peninsular war, and finally the monotonous streets of the lower town, through which we drove.