fitted to express melancholy than happiness. It is in the Longa that the fêtes and masked balls of the carnival take place. Before we have done speaking of the monumental buildings, let us say a few words about the ancient Convent of La Merced, where a great number of pictures have been collected, some mediocre, and the others, with very few exceptions, extremely bad. What delighted me more than anything else at La Merced, was a yard surrounded by a cloister, and planted with palm-trees, perfectly oriental by their size and beauty, and which shot up like spires through the limpid air. The real attraction of Valencia, for a traveller, is its population; or, to speak more correctly, that of the Huerta which surrounds it. The Valencian peasants wear a costume of characteristic strangeness of appearance, which cannot have varied much since the invasion of the Arabs, and which differs very little from the present costume of the Moors of Africa. This costume consists of a shirt, of flowing drawers of coarse linen, kept up by a red sash, and of a green or blue velvet waistcoat, furnished with buttons made of small pieces of silver money; the legs are clothed in a sort of _knémides_ or leggings of white wool, with a blue border, which leave the knee and instep exposed to view. For shoes, they wear _alpargatas_, sandals of plaited cords, the soles of which are nearly an inch thick, and which are tied by ribbons like the buskins of the Greeks. Their heads are generally shaved in the oriental fashion, and they are nearly always enveloped in a handkerchief of a gaudy colour; and on this handkerchief is placed a little low-shaped hat, with a turned-up brim, and ornamented with velvet, silk tassels, spangles, and tinsel. A piece of motley-coloured stuff, called a _capa de muestra_, ornamented with rosettes of yellow ribbon, and which is thrown across the shoulder, completes this costume, full of nobleness and character. The Valencian keeps his money, his bread, his water-melon, and his _navaja_, in the corners of his café, which he arranges in a thousand different manners; it forms for him, at the same time, a wallet and a cloak. At present, we are only speaking, it must be remembered, of the full dress costume, of the holiday suit. On ordinary days, the Valencian keeps on hardly anything but his shirt and drawers; and then, with his enormous black whiskers, his sunburnt face, his fierce look, and his bronze-coloured arms and legs, he has quite the appearance of a Bedouin, especially if he undoes his handkerchief and exposes to view his bare head, looking as smooth and blue as a well-bearded chin just shaved. In spite of Spanish pretensions to catholicism, I shall always find much difficulty to bring myself to think that such stalwart fellows are not Mussulmans. It is probably, owing to this ferocious air, that the Valencians have obtained the name of bad people (_male gente_), by which they are designated in the other provinces of Spain. I