In this agreeable vehicle, completely innocent of anything like springs, we went along at the rate of four Spanish leagues, which are equal to five French leagues, an hour; just one mile an hour more than the rate attained by our best horsed mails on our best roads. Had we desired to have gone faster we must have procured English racers or hunters. Our route was diversified by a succession of steep ascents and rapid descents, down which we always rattled at a most furious gallop. All the assurance and skill for which Spanish postilions and conductors are famous was requisite to prevent our being shivered into a thousand pieces at the bottom of the various precipices; instead of capsizing merely once, we ought to have been capsizing without intermission. We were thrown from one side to the other like mice, when a person shakes them about for the purpose of stunning and killing them against the sides of the trap. Nothing but the severe beauty of the landscape could have prevented us from becoming melancholy and crooked in the back; but the lovely hills, with their austere outline, and their sober, calm tints, imparted such a distinctive character to the horizon, which was changing every moment, that they more than compensated for the jolting we got in the _galera_. A village, or some old convent, built like a fortress, varied the oriental simplicity of the view, which reminded us strongly of the background of Decamps's picture of "Joseph sold by his Brethren." Dueñas, which is situated upon a hill, looks like a Turkish cemetery. The caverns, scooped out of the living rock, are supplied with air by little bell-shaped towers, which at first sight bear a singular resemblance to minarets. A Moorish-looking church completes the illusion. To our left, in the plain, we caught occasional glimpses of the canal of Castile; it is not yet completed.