crickets chatter loudly in a few stunted elms by the roadside. All is greyness without colour, and in late summer the stubble-fields far and near add a new note of desolation, and it seems out of keeping with the character of the country that these fields should ever be a fresh green in spring. Indeed, the occasional hollows of olives and plots of vineyards have an air of unreality in the surrounding wilderness of crumbling dust and shale. Yet some welcome patches of colour are to be found, if it is only a line of chicory or of huge purple thistles along a stubble-field, or a blue-bloused peasant jogging down the dusty road on a mule with crimson trappings. And on the threshing-floors around the villages, where work is carried on far into the night, often by lightning flash, the white shirts and blue blouses of the men, and the pink and red dresses and long white headkerchiefs of the women form a picturesque and beautiful scene through the clouds of flying chaff and ruddy golden grain falling in heavier, more compact masses. For here the threshing is all done by hand with the help of mules, oxen, and horses, which are driven round and round, drawing all the children of the village on little wooden sledges. When the grain has been thus sifted, the process is completed by throwing it into the air from long wooden shovels and close-pronged wooden forks. The corn is grown on precipices and sheer mountain-sides, and is brought down to the threshing-floors on donkeys, which disappear beneath their rustling load. The men who live in this grim country are also stern and grim, harsh featured, hard, and strong; and, though hospitable and not unkindly, they are fierce and obstinate upon occasion, and sometimes cruel to their animals. Their food is rough, but not unplentiful; of wheat there is no lack, and with some vines and olives they are content to have the three necessities of a Spanish peasant’s life. The villages would often pass unnoticed on their rocky hills were it not for the outstanding feature of their grim, massive churches; the church of Gallipienzo dominates a mountain, and is so solid and fine that it seems to dwarf it. These churches are to be seen for very many miles across the completely bare country, and at night the lights of the village streets form, from long distances, strange, irregular letters on a mountain-side, making the village far more conspicuous than it would be by day. Sansol, a little village not far from Logroño, looks from some distance like a great fortress of brown stone with tiny black loop-holes (the glassless windows); behind is a long backbone of grey, rocky hill, and beyond the purple-black Monte Jura with a glimpse of white road. Bitter and fierce are the winters in Navarre, and pitiless the sun in summer; but for all its forbidding aspects it repays the discomforts of a visit to its remote districts. Lumbier is like a miniature Toledo, on its bare hill above