Sadness came upon me as soon as I entered this place. Grass was growing in the streets, and misery and distress stared me in the face on every side. Ferrol is the grand naval arsenal of Spain, and has shared in the ruin of the once splendid Spanish navy: it is no longer thronged with those thousand shipwrights who prepared for sea the tremendous three-deckers and long frigates, the greater part of which were destroyed at Trafalgar. Only a few ill-paid and half-starved workmen still linger about, scarcely sufficient to repair any _guarda costa_ {43a} which may put in dismantled by the fire of some English smuggling schooner from Gibraltar. Half the inhabitants of Ferrol {43b} beg their bread; and amongst these, as it is said, are not unfrequently found retired naval officers, many of them maimed or otherwise wounded, who are left to pine in indigence: their pensions or salaries having been allowed to run three or four years in arrear, owing to the exigencies of the times. A crowd of importunate beggars followed me to the _posada_, and even attempted to penetrate to the apartment to which I was conducted. “Who are you?” said I to a woman who flung herself at my feet, and who bore in her countenance evident marks of former gentility. “A widow, sir,” she replied, in very good French; “a widow of a brave officer, once admiral of this port.” The misery and degradation of modern Spain are nowhere so strikingly manifested as at Ferrol. Yet even here there is still much to admire. Notwithstanding its present state of desolation, it contains some good streets, and abounds with handsome houses. The _alameda_ is planted with nearly a thousand elms, of which almost all are magnificent trees, and the poor Ferrolese, with the genuine spirit of localism so prevalent in Spain, boast that their town contains a better public walk than Madrid, of whose _prado_, when they compare the two, they speak in terms of unmitigated contempt. At one end of this _alameda_ stands the church, the only one in Ferrol. To this church I repaired the day after my arrival, which was Sunday. I found it quite insufficient to contain the number of worshippers who, chiefly from the country, not only crowded the interior, but, bareheaded, were upon their knees before the door to a considerable distance down the walk.