The lights of Bayonne at length gladly broke upon us as the evening darkened, and in a short time we were rattling with horse and bells through the heavy stone gates, and over the moats and drawbridges of the city walls. The old narrow streets, with their tall houses covered with balconies, lattices, and coloured blinds, were a foretaste of those to be seen in Spain. The rows of lighted shops, beneath heavy low arcades built of hewn stone, and supported by stout pillars, brown with age, were all crowded with busy passengers, garbed with sash, velvet breech, and bonnet. The bright cafés--filled with loungers, small politicians, and trim waiters, with their hair mowed to the roots--were shedding on the roadway floods of yellow light. On we rattled, over roads not paved yesterday, if ever paved at all, amidst bumping and jingling, forced to listen from time to time to periodic fits of shocking language addressed to the smoking horses, gay in coloured trappings, and trotting us merrily along. Now we dived into a narrow alley, black as pitch darkness could make it. Then we twisted out of it so sharply, round a corner, that, had our hair not been carefully oiled, it would have stood on end, and emerged into a wide street full of gas lamps, illuminated windows, and rows of bright green little trees, trimmed so artificially that they had as little resemblance to their natural growing congeners as those in a child's Noah's ark. It was pleasant, after our dreary day's journey, to find ourselves thus hurrying, in the brilliant flare of the night lamps, through a most picturesque old town, over bridges from which we could see in the rapid waters below the twinkling reflection of a hundred lights, along streets in which we passed companies of soldiers marching to the music of drums and bugles, and through busy quays all alive with bustle and loaded with merchandise. In fact, "The city gates were opened; the market, all alive With buyers and with sellers, was humming like a hive; Blithely on brass and timber the craftsman's stroke was ringing; And blithely o'er her panniers the peasant girl was singing." And "blithely" we eventually entered the Hotel * * *, and sat down to a remarkably good dinner of fresh sardines, wild boar, _paté de foie de canard_, and a dish of _beccaficoes_. "Our bore," the inevitable Cockney across the table, fired off a sickly joke at the expense of those little birds, to the effect that, if we had never yet eaten _beccaficoes_, we ought-to-learn (_ortolan_). Now really! Oh! who can minister to the "mind diseased" that produces such monstrosities?