their bread; and amongst these, as it is said, are not unfrequently found retired naval officers, many of them maimed or otherwise wounded, who are left to pine in indigence; their pensions or salaries having been allowed to run three or four years in arrear, owing to the exigencies of the times.  A crowd of importunate beggars followed me to the posada, and even attempted to penetrate to the apartment to which I was conducted.  “Who are you?” said I to a woman who flung herself at my feet, and who bore in her countenance evident marks of former gentility.  “A widow, sir,” she replied, in very good French; “a widow of a brave officer, once admiral of this port.”  The misery and degradation of modern Spain are nowhere so strikingly manifested as at Ferrol.

Yet even here there is still much to admire.  Notwithstanding its present state of desolation, it contains some good streets, and abounds with handsome houses.  The alameda is planted with nearly a thousand elms, of which almost all are magnificent trees, and the poor Ferrolese, with the genuine spirit of localism so prevalent in Spain, boast that their town contains a better public walk than Madrid, of whose prado, when they compare the two, they speak in terms of unmitigated contempt.  At one end of this alameda stands the church, the only one in Ferrol.  To this church I repaired the day after my arrival, which was Sunday.  I found it quite insufficient to contain the number of worshippers who, chiefly from the country, not only crowded the interior, but, bare-headed, were upon their knees before the door to a considerable distance down the walk.

Parallel with the alameda extends the wall of the naval arsenal and dock.  I spent several hours in walking about these places, to visit which it is necessary to procure a written permission from the captain-general of Ferrol.  They filled me with astonishment.  I have seen the royal dockyards of Russia and England, but for grandeur of design and costliness of execution, they cannot for a moment compare with these wonderful monuments of the bygone naval pomp of Spain.  I shall not attempt to describe them, but content myself with observing, that the oblong basin, which is surrounded with a granite mole, is capacious enough to permit a hundred first-rates to lie conveniently in ordinary:  but instead of such a force, I saw only a sixty-gun frigate and two brigs lying in this basin, and to this inconsiderable number of vessels is the present war marine of Spain reduced.

I waited for the arrival of Antonio two or three days at Ferrol, and still he came not:  late one evening, however, as I was looking down the street, I perceived him advancing, leading our only horse by the bridle.  He informed me that, at about three leagues from Coruna, the heat of the weather and the flies had so distressed the animal that it had fallen down in a kind of fit, from which it had been only relieved by copious bleeding, on which account he had been compelled to halt for a day upon the road.  The horse was evidently in a very feeble state; and had a strange rattling in its throat, which alarmed me it first.  I however administered some remedies, and in a few days deemed him sufficiently recovered to proceed.