a new Captain-General to make his appearance at any hour.  However, Castilian hospitality is not to be taken in default, and at 4 P.M. we landed with great ceremony, and after being conducted to the palace, and exchanging a few glances with the acting Governor, who cannot speak a word of any language known to me, I was shown a magnificent suite of apartments destined for me and my following, and then conveyed for a drive in one of the carriages-and-four (vide Sir J. Bowring’s book), escorted by a guard of lancers.  It is very curious to see a state of things so different from ours.  Such a number of troops; gens-d’armes on horseback; not a person meeting us (the Governor-General was with me) who did not take off his hat.  At dinner I sat next the Admiral, who also speaks nothing but Spanish; so we passed our time in looking at each other unutterable things.

[Sidenote:  Churches.]

Ten A.M.—­I have just got rid of my uniform, in which I thought it proper to attire myself in order to receive all the officers, naval and military, who came at nine o’clock to pay their respects.  I had strolled out much earlier incognito, and wandered into several churches.  They abound here, as do monks of all orders.  The decorations seemed tinselly enough, but there was the Catholic ritual, with its sublime suggestions and trivial forms, repeating itself under the equator in the extreme East, as it repeats itself at Paris or Madrid, and under Arctic or Antarctic circles.  And here, as there, at these early morning services, were a few solitary women assisting; some of them commonplace-looking enough, but others, no doubt, with a load of troubles to deposit at the altar, or in the ear of the monk in the box, heavy enough to furnish the burden of many such romances as those which thrill the public sensibilities in our days.  After all, when the horrors which have brought about the result are past and forgotten, there is something gained by that truculent Spanish system which forces the faith upon all who come within its reach. Fais-toi chretienner, ou je t’arrache l’ame, as Charlemagne (not a Spaniard, by the way, so there my illustration halts) said to his heathen enemies.  There is something, I say, gained by it when the origin is forgotten, because the bond of a common creed does do a little towards drawing these different races together.  They are not separated from each other by that impassable barrier of mutual contempt, suspicion, and antipathy, which alienates us from the unhappy natives in those lands where we settle ourselves among inferior orders of men.  An administrative net of a not very flexible nature encloses all, and keeps each member of the body politic pretty closely to the post allotted to him; but the belief in a common humanity, drawn perhaps rather from the traditions of the early, than from the practice of the modern church, runs like a silken thread through the iron tissue.  One feels