the peaceful government of Spain was hopeless—his Majesty gave it up as a bad job—and the two Chambers, combining as the sovereign Cortes, proclaimed the Republic by a majority of four to one. Of the aspirants to the crown there were notably Don Carlos Maria de los Dolores, the legitimate heir—if there be any virtue in legitimacy—and Don Alfonso, only son of the deposed Isabella, a boy of fifteen, at school at Vienna, a legitimate claimant if the abolition of the Salic law in 1830 be acknowledged. There was one who might have been a king, but sensibly declined the proffered honour, in the person of the ancient Espartero, Duke of Victory, Prince of Vergara; and there was a Prussian princeling, a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who had been nominated king in the midsummer of 1870, and whose nomination afforded the coveted pretext for the war between France and Germany. Besides, every Captain-General in the country—and the allowance is five—was a king in prospectu, not to mention the multifarious leaders of the many parties in the Congress, all of whom were qualified to be kings in their own conceit. Spain being thus suffering from a plethora of kings—as one result of which the Republic existed—it struck those who had commissioned me to chronicle the humours of besieged Paris that I might find some material for instructive and entertaining writing at the other side of the Pyrenees.

There are several ways of getting to Madrid. I had no difficulty in selecting mine—in fact, I had no choice. It was my duty to go there by the quickest route, no matter what the expense, the danger, or the inconvenience. These were the terms implied in my bond. The first stage was to Bordeaux. Over that I shall not dwell beyond a passing note on the excitement of the mad drive from terminus to terminus through Paris streets, in the early morn, at the rate of four statute miles an hour, in order, as Brother Jonathan has it, to "establish connection," and the misery of the long railway pilgrimage south. The scenery, I believe, was lovely; but fatigue, and the worry of a constrained position, and the frequent jerky stops as one was dozing to sleep, and the impatient summons "en voiture" as the hungry man was settling to a square meal, indisposed one for the proper appreciation of the picturesque. I got so eye-dazed from the whirl and dust and flitting sentinels of telegraph-posts on the long music-lines of telegraph-wires, that I could not distinguish a life-buoy from a funeral wreath. There were no sleeping-cars between Paris and Bordeaux then; back-ache, with an occasional variety in the shape of migraine, is my principal memory of that journey. Back-ache, the reader will allow, would take the poetry out of a honeymoon trip. And here I interpose a short parenthesis to register my acknowledgment to the philanthropist who invented sleeping-cars with their complementary accommodations. He is a benefactor to travelling humanity. Statues have been erected to dozens who have done less good to their kind—soldiers, lawyers, politicians, and patent pill-makers. Sleeping-cars avert exhaustion, ill-humour, bad dreams, and kidney-disease, not to exclude the back-ache and migraine afore-mentioned. Whenever a bronze memorial is to be raised on the Thames Embankment to their inventor, I am ready with my contribution.

At Bordeaux, where I shuffled into the nearest hotel, I uncoiled myself, and took the kinks out of my bones; but of the wine capital I shall say no more than that "I came, I slept, I left." At leaving, a little adventure variegated the itinerary. As I entered the railway-carriage, a gentleman on the opposite seat, its only occupant, was sucking an orange. I pulled out my cigar-case, and politely asked him if he had any objection to my smoking.

"Are you a German?" he demanded stiffly.

"Pardon me," I said, "I inquired if you had any objection to my smoking."

"Are you a German?" he repeated almost fiercely, his eyes flashing.

"I fail to see what business it is of yours what my nationality may be."

"It is my business, and I insist on your answering my question," he shouted, dropping the orange in his anger.

"And I decline to answer it," I said quietly.

Now he fairly raged. There is nothing which so provokes a man of hasty temper, with whom you may be in a controversy, as to preserve a tranquil, self-possessed demeanour. Ladies who nag their husbands are aware of this interesting feature in household ethics.

"Ah, you are a German!" he yelled. "You are a Prussian. I will not sit in the same compartment with you'!" and he stood up, and danced, and went through a round of epileptic gesticulation.

"Your absence will not leave me inconsolable," said I, in soft, sweet accents, ceremoniously lifting my hat.

He bounced out of the carriage like a maniac, stamped along the platform, muttering with incoherent vehemence as he went, and presently reappeared with a gendarme, whom he informed that he suspected I was a Prussian spy. Interrogated, he could advance no proof beyond his own suspicions, my arrogant coolness of manner, and my hesitation in returning a straightforward reply.

"I am sure he is," he concluded, "for he all but admitted it."

The gendarme was perplexed, and asked me very civilly, was I a German?

"Distinctly not," I answered.

Had Monsieur any papers? I produced my British passport, which he looked at, pretended to understand, folded up, returned to me with excuses for having given me so much trouble, and fixed a look of grave reproach on his countryman. The latter was embarrassed, and had not the grace to make a frank apology, but mumbled something to the effect that I might have saved all this annoyance if I had stated what countryman I was at first.

"If you had put your question in the French fashion, that is to say courteously, I might have done so," I said.

He blushed, and stammered forth the apology at last; he hoped I would forgive his quickness, but he could not control himself when he met a German; he hated the race—the Germans were a pack of cold-blooded robbers, who had brought ruin on his country. He had vowed vengeance against them, and he had reason for it, for he was an Alsatian.

I saw my chance.

"Mon Dieu!" I exclaimed, throwing up my hands in affected horror. "It is you who are the German, then, and not I. Do you not know, sir, that Alsace has been a province of Germany for the past two years?"

If the face be an index to the mind, that Alsatian must have passed through a mental cyclone. Luckily for the angel who records bad language, his rage was so terrible that he lost the power of speech, the while I gently moved my head to and fro, and gazed at him with compassionate remonstrance, as much as to say how could he, a sausage-eating creature, have had the heart to pass himself off on me as a Frenchman? It was cruel, but it was merited. That Alsatian I despised as the meanest thing in patriotism I had ever met—and my experience of the article is not limited—for even were I a German, so long as I behaved myself with propriety he had no right to insult me by his surly cross-examination. But I suppose the poor devil thought he was playing the rôle of redresser of the wrongs of his country, and exacting an instalment of that revanche of which we hear occasional frothing babble. If I were a German I should be proud of it, and I hope I should have had the firmness to tell my Alsatian interlocutor so to his teeth.

From Bordeaux to Bayonne, down through the Landes, is a most interesting ride, as I dimly recollect; but I have no notes of it, and I infer that nothing particular occurred as I sped through the fat, nice, pleasant country. I had a short stay at Bayonne—long enough, however, to enable me to mark by ethnological signs and tinge of complexion that Spain was near. There were architectural signs, too,