Olmedo, where the coach stops for the passengers to dine, is completely in ruins. Whole streets are deserted, and others choked up by fallen houses, while grass grows in the squares. Like the doomed cities mentioned in Holy Writ, Olmedo will soon contain no inhabitants save the flat-headed viper, the blear-eyed owl, and the dragon of the desert, who will drag the scales of his belly over the stones of the altars. A girdle of old dismantled fortifications surrounds the place, and the charitable ivy throws its cloak of verdure over the nudity of the gutted and yawning towers. Nature endeavours to repair as well as she can the ravages committed by Time and War. The depopulation of Spain is frightful: in the time of the Moors she possessed thirty-two millions of inhabitants, and, at present, the numbers, at most, ten or eleven millions. Unless some very fortunate change takes place--a thing that is not excessively probable--or the marriages are blessed with supernatural fecundity, many towns that were once flourishing will be abandoned altogether, and their ruins of brick and clay insensibly become amalgamated with the soil which swallows up all things--cities as well as men. In the room where we dined, a tall woman, built like a Cybele, kept walking up and down, carrying under her arm an oblong basket, covered with a piece of stuff. From this basket there issued little plaintive cries, rather like those of a very young child. I was somewhat puzzled at this, because the basket was so small that if it had contained a child the latter must have been of the most microscopic and phenomenal proportions--a Lilliputian that ought to be exhibited at fairs. It was not long before the enigma was explained. The nurse--for such she was--drew out from the basket a coffee-coloured puppy, and sitting down, very gravely suckled this new description of baby. She was a _pasiega_ going to Madrid to take a situation, and was afraid that her supply of milk might dry up.