There is no cloud in the clear March sky, filled with radiant light. Beyond the dark green of orange-trees and grey olives lies the sea, a faint line of blue. And, to the west, the mountains of bare rock are faintly purple, looking frail and brittle in their clear but distant outlines. A herd of goats passes slowly down a wide river-bed of smooth white stones, with no shred or vestige of water. Lines of aloes and tall reeds grow along its banks, and on either side peasants dressed in black are at work in the fields, ploughing with single mules between the brown stems of vines recently pruned, or pruning the orange-trees and olives. Bundles of vine and olive twigs lie ready to be carted to the village for fuel. Women in dresses of white and pink and scarlet are hoeing the green corn. The pear- and peach-trees are in flower, and the almond-trees fully arrayed in freshest green. At intervals, wells or _norias_ explain the green fresh look of the country, so different from the burnt desolation of the waterless regions further north. For Oropesa, the neighbouring village, is but some sixty miles north of Valencia, and is bordered on the one side by the full fertility of the Valencian plain, though on the other it is surrounded by barren hills. In each _noria_ a long crooked branch forms the handle to the iron wheel and to this a mule is tied, and as the mule turns, the wheel revolves with a slow clinking sound, and the long earthenware jars (_arcaduces_) attached to the wheel gush water into a trough and so by small channels of dry earth into the fields of brown and reddish soil. A path leads through green fields and clumps of orange-trees to the village. In some fields further south the last oranges have been gathered, and thousands of pearl-shaped buds tell that the trees before long will be covered with a glistening snow of scented blossoms. But in many the oranges still reign resplendent: on a grey day they stand out with more vivid distinctness than when the sun blurs them in a luminous haze, leaving them clearly visible only in the level light of its rising or its setting. The trees are bowed with fruit, and the laden branches are propped up from the ground. The thronging oranges glow in myriad spheres of gold, here and there lie golden mounds of gathered oranges, and below the trees the ground is a strewn pavement of gold. On every side beneath the trees may be seen a magic land of myriad golden lamps; single or in trefoils and clusters of seven and ten and twenty, the oranges hang within a few inches of the ground. Hundreds of yards away through intervals of trees appears the same foison of gleaming fruit, and the air is all scented with oranges. From time to time a light wind blows beneath the trees, and the twigs with their burdens of crowding oranges sway heavily to and fro, like slowly swung censers of burning gold. But near Oropesa the oranges are comparatively few. The village is built on a steep