Romantic Spain

treats partly of Spain, bu

nd the charge I had brought against myself was that of harbouring a vagrom spirit. I should have been born in a gipsy caravan or under a Bedaween's tent. Nature intended me to have become a traveller, a showman, or a knight-errant; and had Nature been properly seconded, I should have been doing something Burnabyish, Barnumesque, or Quixotic this afternoon, instead of sitting down on a bench between a tremulous old man in almshouse livery and a small boy f

ntle-born va

this humdrum country within any reasonable period. A General Election which is going on, with its paltry show of coloured strips of calico, its printed appeals to the gullible, its occasional bits of ribbon and bursts of cheering, its egoti

t book as I jog along the grooves of the street rails, and survey the prospect from the roof. How do those mules on the flanks manage to avoid knocking their hoofs against the metal-ruts, and tripping themselves up? What a stand-and-deliver air the conductor has as he presents his snip-snap apparatus, like the brutal key of the primitive dentist, and viciously punches an orifice in your ticket! For these conductors, as for letter-carriers, I have a profound sympathy; they are over-

e or semi-detached! The patches of verdure, so refreshing to the jaded city eye, are diminishing in size and lessening in number. I like Greenwich; but they should never have removed the veterans of the ocean from it. Dear to the soul of youth, hankering for the strange and the stirring, were their three-cornered hats, their wooden stumps, their withered monkey-jaws puffed with quids, and their hoarse, squall-tearing voices. What

Pool; how readily they answer the wheel; with what ease they slow or quicken their run, and dart hither and thither; and with what nicety they are brought alongside the floating wharf! I wonder do the skippers of these boats move their hands in their dreams. Is the finger-sign for "Back her," that they use at home when they wish to replenish their pipes? Collisions there may be, explosions there have been; but the career of the mariner who plies between Chelsea Pier and

like Anthony Trollope, who can sit down to their desks and turn out so many pages of copy at a stretch mechanically, much as a tinglary with its rotating handle grinds out a series of tunes. I cannot write unless I am in the mood, and that, I find, dep

xpenditure of tenpence. Who would waste his substance on coach-men and high-steppers; who would envy Sir Thomas Brassey his lordly pleasure-craft, when this round of travel, with its buoyant sense of independence at the end,

Inkermann, and to associations with William Black, Henry Bessemer, and John Ruskin, master of art, which is something more, and more significant, than that Magister Artium which persons doubtful of their gifts or station ostentatiously affix to their names? And in our groves we have such variety of arborescent prizes as no other district of London can boast, extending to the arbutus or st

police-station where you may sleep the fuddle off; a pillar-box where a letter may be posted summoning a bail to your aid; a drinking-fountain where you may slake your thirst when you come out penitent from the police-office; a Turkish-bath, with a crescent-and-star daubed piece of bunting o

ok-makers, and can hold his own with the tongue; he married into the family of a late eminent prizefighter, and, with the connection, seems to have acq

tes a man as bona fide a traveller as Henry M. Stanley, and endows hi

of a bundle, and therefore indented w

tall, you may take for granted it is a British carcase. Foreign meat

avert identification, the best spot to throw yourself off is in the neighbourhood of a ship

jockey, and my friend Wat has a far fuller education than the primest of jockeys. He is apt and accurate in quotations from English literature; and if you venture to make Greeks "meet" Greeks in his presence, or talk of fresh "fields" and pastures new, or attribute the temp

it true you are going on a

health and lung-power

I ask? Can you not d

ay be able to freshen up my ideas, and set down some notes in

ce, it will be perfectly delightful journeyin

booked for Inverness o

h Awe, and Inverness is at the other side of Loch Awe? Thither a

t entered into these deta

got many e

I accept as a good omen; and, curiously

Edinburgh and Stirling. What

old

if you bus it to King's Cross, and stop at a temperance hotel in 'Auld Reekie,' and give servants no tips, and condescend

mean? You surely

urgh alone is five-pun-nine-and-six; a

k foolish, "I may have means of g

f you think you can try on that, well and good; but I'm getting

endant had some appreciation of humour; but Wat did the correct thing, nevertheless, in rebuking

ust not check the flow of your eloquence; indifference must not chill your enthusiasm. You must be suave, alert, sonorous, and roll forth a discourse got off by rote as if it were the offspring of the moment's inspiration. The combustion of thought must appear to be a

ut if a Derby dog strays on the course-I mean

d endeavours to balance himself on the tip of his nose on the

en you are what you cal

ized with a fancy to sternuta

miringly. "I swear I could spell that. By-the-bye

erum Cr

am just on my way

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g catching is sure to suggest itself. The dedic

to the slaughter-house. If the Val de Pe?as is rasping to his palate, he ignores that the taste for wine, as for olives and Dublin stout and Glenlivat, is acquired. If the tobacco is coarse and weedy, he forgets that it is cheap, and that he can roll his cigarette and smoke it between the courses. But why does he not console himself for the absent by what is present-the ripe golden sun, the luscious fruits, the picturesque costumes, the high-bred dignity of the humblest beggar, the we

one which he might have learned in London, namely, that Price's circus is not quite so good as Sanger's in Westminster or Hengler's off Oxford Street. Out upon the poor fool! He know Spain! Why, that is more than I could dare to say, and I have had experience of it under Monarchy and Republic, in peace and in war; have mixed with Carlists in the field, and Intransigentes in the fortress; have traversed it from Irun to Gibraltar, from Santander to Malaga. He who has not been admitted into the intimacy of domestic life in Spain, who has not listened to habaneras by the camp-fire, joined in the jota on the village sward, shared in thorough sympathy in the sports of the arena and in the rites of religion, dipped into the peasant's olla podrida, nay, even watched the flushed gamblers over their cards, with the ea

f the latter-day critics of Spain and the Spaniards are of the class who are ready to write social novels on Chinese life with no more knowledge of the Flowery Land than is to be obtained under the dome of the Reading-room of the British Museum. The pity of it is that this second-hand evidence is too often taken on trust, while the truthful records of eye-witnesses are shoved into a dusty corner of the cupboard. It is so nice to be patted on the head and rubbed down with the grain, to be reminded that we are what we always thought ourselves to be-the perfect, the registered A 1 people of the universe, the people who set the pattern, the people who are righteous, mora

ng, you can pick at will from "Swain's Collection of Easy Sentences." If I wait till I am in the mood, my suspense may be as long as that of the rustic on the bank of the stream. Perhap

inions when he feels himself in the wrong, there are in his case two reasons all-sufficient to secure his counterfeit presentment a niche in my album, and himself a nook in my heart-he hath killed a bull in the

*

put one n in innuendo, and the i after the lls in paillasse. If he had only gone to the root of the matter! I of