After holding out a handful of small coins, thus simplifying matters by letting the omnibus-driver help himself, we were escorted in slow procession,--the luggage going first,--by a train of four damsels, and a very brown old woman, bearing candles, through winding passages all whitewashed, up cold stone flights of stairs, the walls of which seemed to be covered with any amount of black-beetles, until we were ushered into a small double-bedded room, also whitewashed, and adorned with violently coloured prints of saints and martyrs, with what appeared to be fireworks fizzing and exploding out of the backs of their heads. We were then presented with a cup of some darkly red and rather muddy-looking fluid called chocolate, highly flavoured with what to us is the most nauseous thing in the world,--cinnamon. A piece of black bread, and a pat of something which might once have been butter, but now resembled railway wheel-grease, or cheese, was then given to us. Half of a cold bird, of a species, we should imagine, nearly extinct, seemed as little calculated to please the appetite as the bread, butter, and chocolate. These luxuries were placed upon a chest of drawers, there being no table; and as no chair could be found of sufficient altitude to raise us to a proper level with these delicacies, we were constrained to stand at our feast. The procession of curious followers had now halted, and deployed into a semicircle around us, doubtless to watch the effects of this astonishing banquet upon our weak minds and empty stomachs. To taste of the half-bird was at once to come to the conclusion that the poultry in Spain is fed chiefly on gravel. The black-eyed young ladies who lingered round us wonderingly while we were regaling ourselves, as if we were two specimens of some remarkable race of men, or inhabitants of the planet Jupiter dropped into their hotel, were at length swept off tittering by the brown old female, and we were left alone with the pyrotechnical saints, the whitewashed walls, a couple of iron bedsteads, two chairs, and the chest of drawers, which still groaned beneath the weight of the remains of the viands that had formed our initiatory banquet in the land of Spain. The wild cry of the watchman moaning through the narrow, silent streets, the distant clang of the great cathedral bell sounding the hour, and the misty moonlight streaming through the casement, gave a peculiar finish to our novel experiences of men and things; and so to bed--to a sleep confused with all sorts of impressions, blurred and running into each other on the palette of the mind.