It was eleven o'clock when we entered Valez-Malaga; the windows were joyfully lighted up, and the streets re-echoed with songs and the sounds of guitars. The young maidens seated in the balconies were singing verses which the _novios_ accompanied from the street below, and each stanza was followed by laughter, shouts, and applause, which I thought would never end. Other groups were dancing the cachucha, the fandango, and the jalo, at the corners of the streets. The guitars emitted a dull hum like that of bees, the castagnettes rattled merrily, and all was music and delight. It would almost appear as if the most important business of a Spaniard's life were pleasure; he gives himself up to it, heart and soul, with admirable ease and frankness. No nation in the world appears to know less of misfortune than the Spaniards, and a stranger travelling through the Peninsula can scarcely believe that the state of political affairs can be so serious, or that he is traversing a country which for ten years has been ravaged and laid waste by civil war. Our peasants are far from possessing the happy carelessness, the joyful look, and the elegant costume of the Andalusian _majos_, and in the matter of education they are greatly inferior to them. Almost all the Spanish peasants can write; their minds are stored with poetry, which they recite or sing without destroying the measure; they are good horsemen, and very dexterous in the use of the knife and carbine. It is true that the admirable fertility of the soil and the beauty of the climate relieves them from the necessity of that brutalizing work, which, in less favoured countries, reduces man to the condition of a beast of burden or a machine, and robs him of those two gifts of heaven, force and beauty. It was not without a feeling of the profoundest satisfaction, that I tied my mule to the bars of the posada.