prison-houses, like pale and lonely lamps flickering in a tomb! Strange that their mission as tender women, who might have soothed the griefs and tempered the hardness of many an honest man, who in return might have loved them as his life, his pride, his all, should be--as citizens of the world--tied to a destiny so awfully aimless, hopeless, and loveless: so dead in their life, and in only too many cases so utterly heart-weary and forlorn! Well, to proceed with our stroll through the picturesque old Spanish streets. We say Spanish,--for it is not every town even in Spain that is Spanish in the character of its architecture. Madrid, for instance, with the exception of a few of the old quarters, has nothing nationally characteristic about it. The sun was now beginning to make itself felt with more than usual vigour; but that was to be expected here, for it is one of the _cosas de España_. From the yellow walls of churches and palaces, its rays were reflected, while overhead there hung one spotless lake of blue. Down a melancholy silent street, where lean dogs were quarrelling for offal, and fierce-eyed, ragged fowl were pecking savagely amongst the dust, was a plain square house, with a few small windows closed by shutters. In this house Columbus died, as the stranger is informed by the following inscription over the door: "Acqui murio Colon." A little further on we came upon an avenue of dry poplars, bordering a small sluggish stream, through which was seen a telescopic view of hot, yellow hills beyond, dotted here and there with rare patches of green, as if the genius of fecundity, in flying over them, had by accident occasionally dropped from his cornucopia a huge bunch of cress. By the side of a ditch, we observed hundreds of washerwomen on their knees, washing shirts in mud, with a large stone. The chattering they made induced "our bore," whom we suddenly met on the bridge, to observe that "there seemed to be a great deal more talking about one thing and another than about anything else." What he meant, goodness knows! A little beyond, was a boy on his stomach, drinking from the stream, not, like the wolf in the fable, above the lamb, here typified by the washerwomen, but below. No wonder cholera is more than usually fatal in Spain, for, certainly, many of their practices invite the approach of pestilence!