The houses are vast and convenient inside; the rooms are lofty, and the architects have evidently not been cramped for space. In Paris a whole house would be built in the well of certain staircases I have seen here. You traverse a long succession of rooms before reaching that part of the house which is really inhabited, for the furniture of all these said rooms consists only of a little whitewash, or a dull yellow or blue tint, relieved by a fillet of colour and sham panelling. Smoky, black-looking pictures, representing some martyr or other in the act of being beheaded or ripped open, favourite subjects with Spanish painters, are suspended against the walls, most of them having no frames, and hanging in folds on the wood-work. Board flooring is a thing that is not known in Spain--at least, I never saw any there. Every room is paved with bricks; but as these bricks are, during the winter, covered with matting made of grass, and during the summer with matting made of rushes, they are much less disagreeable than they otherwise would be. This matting is made with great taste; it could not be better even if manufactured by savages of the Philippine or Sandwich Islands. There are three things which, in my eyes, determine with the precision of thermometers the state of a people's civilization: these are--its pottery-ware, the degree of skill it possesses in plaiting osiers or straw, and its manner of caparisoning its beasts of burden. If the pottery is handsome, pure in form, as correct as the antique, and with the natural colour of the white or red clay; if the baskets and the matting are fine, wonderfully entwined, and enhanced by arabesques of the most admirably-selected colours; and if the harness is embroidered, stitched, and decorated with bells, tufts of wool, and elegant designs, you may be sure that the people is in a primitive state, still very near that of nature: civilized nations can make neither a pot, a mat, nor a set of harness. At the moment I am writing these lines, there is hanging before me, attached to a column by a small string, the _jarra_, in which the water I drink is cooling. This _jarra_ is an earthen pot, worth twelve _cuartos_,--that is to say, about six or seven French sous: its outline is charming, and, with the exception of the productions of Etruscan art, I never saw anything more pure. It spreads out at the top, forming a sort of trefoil with four leaves, each of which has a slight indenture down the middle, so that the water can be poured out in whatever direction the vessel happens to be taken up. The handles, which are ornamented with a small hollow moulding, are most elegantly joined on to the neck and sides; the swell of the latter is delicious. Instead of these charming vases, the wealthy people prefer abominable big-bellied, podgy, ill-shapen English pots, covered with a thick coating of varnish, and resembling large jack-boots polished white. But while talking of boots and pottery