shadows in the narrow streets of sleeping villages. The driver must undergo not only extremes of heat and cold, but is often in danger of snowdrifts and swollen torrents and rocks from the hill-sides. A Navarrese innkeeper, an old soldier of Santa Cruz, introduced a driver of a _diligencia_ as “the bravest man of my acquaintance.” Spanish travellers accept all these discomforts with a marvellous, fatalistic resignation and equanimity; but even a pedestrian will go further and fare better in an afternoon than a traveller in _diligencia_ during a whole day. Still, as a unique experience, a _diligencia_ drive must be undertaken; and the driver is good company, sparing time from the loud praise and blame meted out to his mules to bestow pithy comments on the living and the dead-- “The crosses in the mountain pass, Mules gay with tassels, the loud din Of muleteers, the tethered ass That crops the dusty wayside grass, And cavaliers with spurs of brass Alighting at the inn.” The inns, _mesones_, _ventorrillos_, _ventas_, _posadas_, _paradores_, are still much the same as in the times of Cervantes, moderately clean, immoderately uncomfortable, bare alike of furniture and food.[48] Still to your first inquiry the answer is, “_Hay de todo_, we have everything,” still to your further inquiry the abstract _todo_ shrinks to _nada_. But for an understanding of the Spanish people, nothing is more interesting and one may add, more pleasant than to listen to their talk as they sit round some great inn fire of crackling scented twigs burning on the stone floor of the court and kitchen. The discomfort and hardships of travel in remote parts of Spain are repaid in flowing measure. Here a solitary peasant is seen ploughing land so precipitous and steep that the stones rattle down as he advances; there the mules stand hour by hour at the plough while the peasants--in this case servants on some great estate--play cards, the large earthenware _botijos_ of water standing ready to their hand; or a group of workers in the fields stand shivering in early morning round a great common _puchero_, dipping their spoons in turn, and in turn raising the _bota_ high above their heads to drink; or one has a glimpse of some peasant’s dress[49] of brilliant colouring, of some ancient vanishing costume of leather or velvet, silk embroidery or silver buttons--at every turn some quaint custom, some curious picturesque scene and colour appears, and the talk of the peasants is a delight. The two most successful English travellers in Spain were beyond doubt, Ford and Borrow. They won the respect of all classes of Spaniards, and saw practically the whole of Spanish life three-quarters of a century ago. Borrow describes himself on one occasion as “dressed in the fashion of the peasants of the neighbourhood of Segovia in Old Castile, namely, I had on my head a species of leather helmet or _montera_, with a jacket and trousers of