The cross-road along which we were journeying ascended and descended rather abruptly through a country dented with hills and furrowed by narrow valleys, the bottom of which was occupied by the dry beds of torrents, and bristling with enormous stones that jolted us most atrociously, and elicited loud screams from the women and children. On our road we noticed some admirably coloured and poetical effects of sunset. The mountains in the distance assumed a variety of purple and violet hues, tinged with gold, of the most extraordinary warmth and intensity, while the total absence of vegetation imparted to the whole scene, consisting exclusively of ground and sky, a look of grand nudity and savage severity that is to be found in no other country, and which no painter has yet transferred to canvass. We halted for a few hours at nightfall, in a little hamlet of three or four houses, in order to rest our mules and obtain some refreshment: but with the thoughtlessness of true French travellers, although a sojourn of five months in Spain ought to have rendered us more prudent, we had brought nothing with us from Malaga, and the consequence was that we were obliged to sup on dry bread and white wine, which a woman in the _posada_ was obliging enough to procure for us, for Spanish safes and cellars do not participate in that horror which Nature is said to entertain for a vacuum, but contain nothing with the most perfect tranquillity of conscience. About one o'clock in the morning we set out again; and, in spite of the awful jolting, of the engineer's children rolling over us, and of the knocks that our heads received from bumping against the spokes of the wagon, we soon fell asleep. When the sun came and tickled our noses with one of his rays, as with a golden ear of corn, we were near Caratraca, an insignificant village which is not marked in the map, and which is only remarkable for its sulphurous springs, which are very beneficial in diseases of the skin, and attract to this remote spot a population that is rather suspicious and not calculated to prove very desirable company. Gambling is carried on there to a frightful extent, and although it was still very early, the cards and ounces of gold were passing from hand to hand. It was something hideous to see these invalids with their green, cadaverous faces, rendered still more ugly by rapacity, slowly stretching out their fingers and seizing convulsively their prey. The houses of Caratraca, like those of all Andalusian villages, are whitewashed; and this, in conjunction with the bright colour of the tiles, the festoons of the vines, and the shrubs growing around, gives them a comfortable, holiday look, very different from the picture we are accustomed to draw, in other parts of Europe, of Spanish filth; this notion is generally false, and the fact of its ever having been entertained can only be attributed to some miserable hamlets in Castile, whose wretchedness