The Plaza de los Toros, or Bull Ring, situated in the _quartier_ called Barceloneta, where the poorer and labouring classes, together with a community of ship-chandlers, reside, has no pretensions in appearance to anything else than what it is, namely, a great wooden slaughter-house. When we arrived in the city the bull fights were over for the season, and the ring was used as a circus and gymnasium for acrobats and athletes. We witnessed within it, however, a spectacle, bloodless indeed, but still with the scent and thirst of blood--and human blood, too--about it, which we may hope can scarcely be witnessed in any other civilised land, whose fiercer passions are not kept in a chronic state of ferment by festive shows of wanton cruelty, and whose tender youth are not deadened from the dawn of their sensibilities to all love of mercy and sympathy for suffering. A female child of seven years was brought into the great arena, which was covered with human beings, their faces all turned upwards. She was engaged to walk the entire length of a rope inclined from the floor on one side of the building up to the roof on the other, about a hundred feet in height. Upon taking her place on the rope, just before commencing her perilous journey, the poor child, suddenly seized with a panic, burst into tears, and evidently shaking with fear, implored to be excused. At this sight, the helpless child trembling in sight of her death, it might be, what emotions filled the breast of the great crowd? Sorrow for young innocence in deadly peril for the idle amusement of the spectators? An imperative desire to rush forward and rescue that tender child from wanton destruction? Did any mother's heart, fluttering with loving thoughts of her own infant, yearn for the rescue of this poor little being, tricked out in sparkling tinsel and pink gauze, trembling alone in mid air on a single rope? No! they all thought only of the value of their miserable pence, and loud rough voices were heard in all directions execrating the child. "Push her on--make her go," they cried, and shook their fists at the poor little creature, whose tears now rained down her cheeks as she looked from side to side, imploringly for one friendly glance. But there was none. With a sudden impulse, however--apparently of pride--she shook her head defiantly, gulped down a sob, and grasping the balancing pole, started on her high and narrow path. She arrived, thank God, at her destination safe and sound, not only, however, without a note of approval or applause, but amidst hisses and jeers. This certainly was a painful page in the study of a nation's characteristics, without one redeeming trait to soften the painful effect it produced, it is to be hoped, on many minds.