When at last the train stopped in the outskirts of Gerona, we mounted on the top of an omnibus and were whirled off through a boulevard of plane trees, in which were groups of very _plain_ folk, who--it being a _fiesta_ day--were dancing and whooping in large circles in a frenzied manner that to us calm onlookers was very remarkable. The sight, however, was brilliant and animating. Scarlet caps, red sashes, velvet breeches, and jackets covered with flashing metal buttons, together with the brilliant petticoats and embroidered bodices of the females, produced a scene that was altogether of the most lively description. Upon emerging from the avenue of plane trees, the town of Gerona burst suddenly upon us. A wonderful old town it is! Talk about the picturesque! Where are all the artists who frequent Wales, Margate, Scarbro', and the over-done East, who give us perennial views of the same, _usque ad nauseam_, until people need never have moved out of London to know them as well as the inhabitants of those places themselves? Why don't they travel hither, and put before the jaded British public this intensely interesting and most extraordinary place? Here they may find novelty and variety to please the most exacting taste. The city as a whole is very old and quaint. Rickety houses appear sometimes to be piled up indiscriminately upon heaps of gaunt battlements and crumbling ramparts. The brown decaying walls tell many a story of the violence and lawlessness of other times. The people of the present day live in houses which are built of the remains of old forts, and are constructed of anything that came to hand at the moment. Rocks, stones, wood, dirt-heaps, mud, old bricks, old ruins, rubbish, all have been raked together, and piled up confusedly into habitations; and a most unique, heterogeneous, and dangerous mass they seem. Houses and other buildings bend and bow to one another in all directions in a very stiff and awkward manner, as if the whole place had been suddenly paralysed in the midst of some general act of politeness. One edifice props up another, as the lame support the lame. There is one church, indeed, constructed out of some old convent walls of great solidity, that supports four feeble houses which lean bodily upon it, and without it would inevitably fall down like so many card-houses. It requires some judgment to walk about with security in the interior of many of these charming dwellings, the strange old rooms necessitating great steadiness of gait and correct judgment of eye, for the floors are not always so level as one might desire. There are heights and hollows which it is advisable to avoid as much as possible if one would escape painful bruises.