Enjoyment in Travelling.—­We travelled in true contrabandista style, taking every thing rough and smooth as we found it, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship.

A Miracle.—­Near Archidona is a mysterious path by which the Virgin Mary is said to have led Queen Isabella to attack an old Moorish castle on the summit of the mountain:  you see this path like a riband up the mountain side; but the miracle is, that though it can be seen at a distance, when you come near it disappears!

Imaginary Treasures.—­The thirsty man dreams of fountains and running streams; the hungry man of ideal banquets; and the poor man of heaps of hidden gold:  nothing certainly is more magnificent than the imagination of a beggar.

Spaniards.—­There is a natural talent or mother wit, as it is called, about the Spaniards, which renders them intellectual and agreeable companions, whatever may be their condition in life, and however imperfect may have been their education:  add to this they are never vulgar, nature has endowed them with an inherent dignity of spirit.

Garden of Lindaraxa.—­“How beauteous is the garden!” says an Arabic inscription, “where the flowers of the earth vie with the stars of heaven, what can compare with the vase of yon alabaster fountain, filled with crystal water?  Nothing but the moon in her fulness, shining in the midst of an uncloudless sky!”

Transitions of Decay.—­I have often observed that the more proudly a mansion has been tenanted in the day of its prosperity, the humbler are its inhabitants in the day of its decline, and that the palace of the king, commonly ends in being the nestling place of the beggar.

A Factotum.—­A portly old fellow with a bottle nose, who goes about in a rusty garb with a cocked hat of oil-skin and a red cockade.  He is one of the legitimate sons of the Alhambra, and has lived here all his life, filling various offices; such as deputy alguazil, sexton of the parochial church, and marker of a fives-court established at the foot of one of the towers.  He is as poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged, boasting of his descent from the illustrious house of Aguilar, from which sprang Gonsalvo of Cordova, the grand captain.  Nay, he actually bears the name of Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in the history of the conquest.  It is a whimsical caprice of fortune to present, in the grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and descendant of the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry, leading an almost mendicant existence about this once haughty fortress, which his ancestor aided to reduce:  yet such might have been the lot of the descendants of Agamemnon and Achilles, had they lingered about the ruins of Troy.

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MANNERS & CUSTOMS OF ALL NATIONS.