This was not William Nelson’s first visit to Spain; he had travelled through it before alone, and remembered nothing but the pleasures of the journey. But his experiences were different now, and he thus wrote to a friend soon after his return: “I have come back from my trip a wiser if not a better man; and the wisdom I have learned is that no one with a party of ladies should attempt travelling in Spain without a courier. We did not indulge in this luxury, and as none of us could speak Spanish, and as it is a rare thing for a Spaniard to learn any language but his own, the troubles that we fell into on this account were not infrequent. Again: Spaniards as a rule have no conscience, and when they have to do with parties travelling as we were, they fleece them most unmercifully; and we were not spared by them, I assure you. I need not say that the old Moorish cities of Spain are very charming, and that the people of Spain are very interesting on account of their picturesque costumes, and their being, as it were, an intermediate race between the people of the Orient and the Occident (to use two words that are rather grand).” It was characteristic of William Nelson’s transparent guilelessness that it never occurred to him to make any secret of his own blunders, or to conceal the mishaps which they involved. He gave a most humorous account of the travellers’ perplexities--the luggage persistently going one way and its owners another, till the ladies’ troubles culminated at Madrid, where the attractions of a court reception and introduction to the state mysteries of the Palacio Real were balked by the lack of all but their travelling costume.