hill-sides--or soil so light that it is swept away by heavy rainfalls--the rain must continue to be a blessing strangely disguised. It is calculated that in six or eight years the trees would knit the soil together, and give it sufficient staying power to resist and absorb the rains, though, of course, there would as yet be no actual profit of timber. Outlay of toil and money for so distant a remuneration is not congenial to the Spanish temperament. The great land-owners do nothing. The State spends a few thousand pesetas every year; but at the present rate afforestation will need hundreds of years, bearing a resemblance to that long-desired map of Spain, which is to be issued in some eleven hundred sections, and of which from two to three sections appear annually.[86] The advantages of irrigation have been amply proved in Spain, justifying the juxtaposition of water and gold in Pindar’s ode; but only about a fiftieth of Spain’s total area--and especially the plain of Granada and the strip of coast of Málaga and Valencia--can at present show the immense productiveness due to irrigation, combined with the swift-maturing sun of Spain. There are, of course, immense difficulties, and not the least are the ignorance and the poverty of the peasants. Water added to a poor soil will be of little value if the peasants are not taught artificial means of enriching the soil, and modern methods of cultivating it. The extreme poverty of the peasants would, however, prevent them at present from employing any but the simplest methods; in many districts they mortgage their land in order to be able to sow their crops, and Spanish farmers are often in the hands of the usurers. The usurer has been their only resource in moments of distress, and finally they are driven to emigrate, leaving their land to the usurer. A narrow strip of fertile land along the rivers stands out in contrast to the desolate country beyond. Thus the Ebro flows through Aragon, among woods of silver birch and poplars, and plantations of olives and vines and maize; but on either side appears the barren country of perfectly bare reddish or brown hills of crumbling earth, like great sand-dunes, without a plant, curiously folded and scored by rushing water, with intricate, abrupt hollows and catacombs. The villages are the colour of the soil, and at no great distance are scarcely distinguishable from a bare hill-side. Or desert plains are thinly covered with grey thyme, and in the more fertile parts produce dwarfed vines and corn, so that in autumn one looks across immense, undivided plains of stubble and yellowing vineyards to the distant horizon of dim blue hills. The cruel winds[87] of Spain blow straight from the iced mountain ridges, unstemmed by any barrier of woods. The first snows fall early round Avila and on the uplands, but in the towns snow at Christmas is rare. The foreigner sometimes has a capricious wish to see these wide, tawny plains covered with snow--_après la plaine