the fortress, in which the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. It was pleasant to see the sentinel presenting arms to it each time his round brought him past the ever open door. On the hill side, a few monumental slabs, let in here and there into the rock, and one or two square tombs, mark the graves of the Englishmen killed during the siege, and also in the Don Carlos revolution. {161} Of the siege itself, and of the historical interest attached to St. Sebastian, we will say nothing: are they not written in the book of the chronicles of Napier and Napoleon? The following morning, after a fine and crowded service at the church of St. Maria, where they first saw the beautiful Spanish custom of the women being all veiled, and in black, two of the party started at seven in the morning, in a light carriage, for Loyola. The road throughout is beautiful, reminding one of the Tyrol, with picturesque villages, old Roman bridges, quaint manor-houses, with coats of arms emblazoned over their porticoes; rapid, clear trout-streams and fine glimpses of snowy mountains on the left, and of the bright blue sea on the right. The flowers, too, were lovely. There was a dwarf blue bugloss of an intensity of color which is only equalled by the large forget-me-not on the mountainsides of Lebanon. The peasants are all small proprietors. They were cultivating their fields in the most primitive way, father, mother, and children working the ground with a two-pronged fork, called by them a "laya;" but the result was certainly satisfactory. They speak a language as utterly hopeless for a foreigner to understand as Welsh or Gaelic. The saying among the Andalusians is that the devil, who is no fool, spent seven years in Bilboa studying the Basque dialect, and learned three words only; and of their pronunciation they add that the Basque write "Solomon," and pronounce it "Nebuchadnezzar!" Be this as it may, they are a contented, happy, prosperous, sober race, rarely leaving their own country, to which they are passionately attached, and deserving, by their independence and self-reliance, their name of "Bayascogara"--"Somos bastantes."