blue or black coats, red sashes, trousers of velvet or velvet corduroy of many shades, from bright yellow to dark brown, the long shining yellow punt poles, and the white pyramids of salt on the sea of sapphire, combine to form a strange and beautiful sight. The empty barges return high in the water, with little mounds of salt left along their ledges. At midday the houses seem to faint and grow indistinct, the mountains fade to a hardly perceptible outline, only the salt reflects the sun in every facet of its countless grains, and glitters whiter than snow. In the sunset the lines resume their sharpness, and the mountains are grey or blue-grey or intense leaden blue or purple, according to their distances. The Murcian sky is famous for its clear serenity, and the sunsets and sunrises are of surpassing fairness. Alicante, too, which is nearer to Murcia than to Valencia, has a wonderful sky and a wonderful sea, and here, too, the “sunrise is a glorious birth.” “Alicante aux clochers mêle les minarets,” says Victor Hugo in one of the poems of “Les Orientales,” and from the sea Alicante has an Oriental look, with its lines of palms, stories of flat roofs, and bare background of hills and mountains. But it is at evening that Alicante is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The lights shine softly through the four lines of palm-trees along the Paseo de los Mártires, and are reflected across the water; in the harbour the last radiance of evening sets the tracery of masts and cranes and rigging in clear relief. To the west the sea is already dark, almost wine-coloured, the οἲνψ of the Greeks, but in the east it is a most exquisite blue, a blue that seems to be a transparent surface of turquoise covering a layer of white chalk. The eastern horizon is faintly purple, and against it the sails of a fleet of fishing-boats are whiter than at any other time, and gleam long after the sun has set. Later the sea catches for an instant the faint purple of the sky, the sky loses its colour, and finally a mistiness of softest grey merges them together, so that one may no longer distinguish where the sky ceases or the sea begins. On the rocks of the coast the waves at night break, filled with phosphorus, in a luminous spray, “like light dissolved in star showers thrown.” The low line of pale lights along El Grao, Valencia’s harbour, if approached at night, has a look, from some distance at sea, of such a phosphorus wave. By day the harbour is seen to be a forest of masts, and far away the towers of Valencia, round the tall Miguelete, appear as numerous, and in the distance almost as slender as the masts of the harbour: “les clochers de ses trois cents églises.” Along the coast of the Huerta, especially to the south of Valencia, glisten a number of snow-white pyramids, that seem at first to be more salt, having the exact look of the mounds that lie along the bay of Cadiz. They are the whitewashed, triangular fronts of the peasants’