My guide, a short but sinewy and well-knit son of the mountains, named Jose Garcia, set off at a canter down the banks of the Darro.  “Don’t ride so fast!” cried Napoleon, who watched our setting out, from the door of the fonda; but Jose was already out of hearing.  This guide is a companion to my liking.  Although he is only twenty-seven, he has been for a number of years a correo, or mail-rider, and a guide for travelling parties.  His olive complexion is made still darker by exposure to the sun and wind, and his coal-black eyes shine with Southern heat and fire.  He has one of those rare mouths which are born with a broad smile in each corner, and which seem to laugh even in the midst of grief.  We had not been two hours together, before I knew his history from beginning to end.  He had already been married eight years, and his only trouble was a debt of twenty-four dollars, which the illness of his wife had caused him.  This money was owing to the pawnbroker, who kept his best clothes in pledge until he could pay it.  “Senor,” said he, “if I had ten million dollars, I would rather give them all away than have a sick wife.”  He had a brother in Puerto Principe, Cuba, who sent over money enough to pay the rent of the house, but he found that children were a great expense.  “It is most astonishing,” he said, “how much children can eat.  From morning till night, the bread is never out of their mouths.”

Jose has recently been travelling with some Spaniards, one of whom made him pay two dollars for an umbrella which was lost on the road.  This umbrella is a thorn in his side.  At every venta where we stop, the story is repeated, and he is not sparing of his maledictions.  The ghost of that umbrella is continually raised, and it will be a long time before he can shut it.  “One reason why I like to travel with foreign Senors,” said he to me, “is, that when I lose anything, they never make me pay for it.”  “For all that,” I answered, “take care you don’t lose my umbrella:  it cost three dollars.”  Since then, nothing can exceed Jose’s attention to that article.  He is at his wit’s end how to secure it best.  It appears sometimes before, sometimes behind him, lashed to the saddle with innumerable cords; now he sticks it into the alforja, now carries it in his hand, and I verily believe that he sleeps with it in his arms.  Every evening, as he tells his story to the muleteers, around the kitchen fire, he always winds up by triumphantly appealing to me with:  “Well, Senor, have I lost your umbrella yet?”

Our bargain is that I shall feed him on the way, and as we travel in the primitive style of the country, we always sit down together to the same dish.  To his supervision, the olla is often indebted for an additional flavor, and no “thorough-bred” gentleman could behave at table with more ease and propriety.  He is as moderate as a Bedouin in his wants, and never touches the burning aguardiente which the muleteers are accustomed to drink.  I asked