poetesses with lyres and laurel crowns; and boys and girls in the costumes of the different provinces of the kingdom—one as a flower-girl of Valencia, another as an Andalusian gypsy or a Basque mountaineer—in the gayest and most picturesque costumes imaginable. Their parents lead them by the hand in the procession, and it is a tournament of good taste, of fantasy, and display in which the people share with great delight.

While I was trying to find my way to the cathedral I met a company of Spanish soldiers. I stopped to look at them, recollecting the picture which Baretti draws when he tells how they assailed him in a hotel, one taking the salad from his plate, while another snatched the leg of a fowl from his mouth. At first sight they resemble the French soldiers, who also wear the red breeches and gray coat reaching to the knee. The only noticeable difference is in the covering of the head. The Spanish wear a parti-colored cap, flat behind and curved in front, and fitted with a visor which turns down over the forehead. The caps, which are made of gray cloth, are light, durable, and pleasing to the eye, and are known by the name of their inventor, Ros de Olano, general and poet, who patterned them after his hunting-cap. The greater part of the soldiers whom I saw—they were all in the infantry—were young men, short of stature, swarthy, alert, and clean, as one would imagine the soldiers of an army which at one time had the lightest and most effective infantry in Europe. Indeed, the Spanish infantry has the reputation of containing the best walkers and swiftest runners. The men are temperate, spirited, and full of a national pride, of which it is difficult to get an adequate idea without studying them closely. The officers wear a short black coat like that of the Italian officers. When off duty they are in the habit of wearing the coat open, thereby revealing a waistcoat buttoned to the chin. In the hours of leisure they do not wear their swords; on the march, like the rank and file, they wear a sort of gaiter of black cloth reaching almost to the knee. A regiment of foot-soldiers completely equipped for action presents an appearance at once pleasing and martial.

The cathedral of Barcelona, in the Gothic style, surmounted by noble towers, is worthy of standing beside the most beautiful edifices in Spain. The interior is formed of three vast naves, separated by two rows of very high pillars slender and graceful in form. The choir, situated in the middle of the church, is profusely decorated with bas-reliefs, filigree-work, and small images. Beneath the sanctuary lies a small subterranean chapel which is always lighted, and in its centre is the tomb of Eulalia, which one may see by looking through one of the little windows opening from the sanctuary. There is a tradition that the murderers of the saint, who was very beautiful, wished before putting her to death to look upon her body, but while they were taking off her last covering a thick cloud enveloped her and hid her from their sight. Her body still remains as fresh and beautiful as when she was alive, and no human eye may endure to look upon it. Once an incautious bishop (after the lapse of a century) wished to open the tomb just to see the sacred remains, but even as he looked he was smitten with blindness.

In a little chapel to the right of the great altar, lighted by many candles, one sees a crucifix of colored wood, with the Christ’s figure inclined to one side. It is said that this image was carried on a Spanish ship at the battle of Lepanto, and that it so bent itself to avoid a cannon-ball which it saw coming straight for its heart. From the arched roof of the same chapel hangs a little galley with all its oars—modelled after the boat in which Don John of Austria fought against the Turks. Below the organ, of Gothic construction and covered with great pictorial tapestries, hangs a huge Saracen’s head with a gaping mouth, from which, in the olden times, candies poured forth for the children. In another chapel one may see a beautiful marble tomb, and also some valuable paintings by Viladomat, a Barcelonian painter of the seventeenth century.

The church is dark and mysterious. Beside it rises a cloister, supported by grand pilasters, formed of delicate columns and surmounted by richly-carved capitals depicting scenes from Bible history. In the cloisters, in the church, in the square lying before it, in the narrow streets running on either side, there broods a spirit of contemplative peace which allures and at the same time saddens one like the gardens of a cemetery. A group of horrid bearded old women guard the door.

After one has visited the cathedral there are no other great monuments to be seen in the city. In the Square of the Constitution are two palaces, called the House of the Deputation and the Consistorial, the first built in the sixteenth, the other in the fourteenth, century. These buildings still retain some old, noteworthy features—the one a door, the other a court.

On one side of the House of the Deputation is the rich Gothic façade of the Chapel of Saint George. Here is a palace of the Inquisition, with a narrow court, windows with heavy iron bars, and secret passages, but it has been almost entirely remodelled on the old plans. There are some enormous Roman columns in the Street of Paradise, lost in the midst of modern buildings, surrounded by tortuous staircases and gloomy chambers.

There is nothing else worth the attention of an artist. However, in compensation there are fountains with rostral columns, pyramids, statues, avenues lined with villas and gardens, and cafés and inns; a circus for bull-fights that has a capacity of seating ten thousand spectators; a town which covers a strip of land enclosing the harbor, laid out with the symmetry of a chequer-board, and peopled by ten thousand seamen; a number of libraries, a very rich museum of natural history, and a repository of archives which contains a vast collection of historical documents dating from the ninth century to our times, which is to say from the first Courts of Catalonia to the War of Independence.

Of the objects outside of the city, the most remarkable is the cemetery, about a half-hour’s ride distant from the gates, in the midst of an extended plain. Seen from a point just outside of the entrance, it looks like a garden, and one quickens one’s pace with a feeling of pleased curiosity. But, once past the gate, one is confronted by a novel spectacle, indescribable, and wholly different from one’s expectation. One is in the midst of a silent city, traversed by long, deserted streets, bordered by straight walls of equal height, which are bounded in the distance by other walls. Advancing, one comes to an intersection, and from that point sees other streets with other walls at the end and other crossways. It is like being in Pompeii. The dead are placed in the walls lengthwise, disposed in various orders, like the books in a library. For every coffin there is a corresponding niche, in which is inscribed the name of the dead. Where no one has been interred there is the word propriedad, which indicates that the position has been engaged. Most of the niches are enclosed in glass, some with iron gratings, others, again, with very fine nettings of woven iron. They contain a great variety of offerings placed there by the families in memory of their dead; as, for instance, photographs, little altars, pictures, embroidery, artificial flowers, and the little nothings that were dear to them in life; ribbons, necklaces, toys of children, books, brooches, miniatures—a thousand things which recall the home and the family, and indicate the profession of those to whom they belonged; and it is impossible to look upon them without