until Perpignan was reached; and as I hurried into a diligence I heard the first Buenos dias and Buen viaje, so pure and sonorous that the words gave me infinite pleasure. Nevertheless, they do not speak Spanish at Perpignan, but they use a dialect formed by a mingling of French, Marseillaise, and Catalan, unpleasant to the ear. I alighted from the diligence at the hotel in the midst of a crowd of officers, gentlemen, Englishmen, and trunks. A waiter compelled me to sit down at a table already spread: I ate until I almost strangled, and was hurried into another diligence and away.

Ah me! I had so long cherished the thought of crossing the Pyrenees, and I now was forced to make the journey by night. Before we arrived at the foothills it was dark. Through the long, long hours, between sleeping and waking, I saw only a bit of the road lit up by the lights of the lantern of the diligence, the black outline of some mountain, the projecting rocks, which seemed to be within arms’ reach of the window, and I heard only the regular tramping of the horses and the whistling of an accursed wind which blew without a moment’s intermission.

Beside me sat an American from the United States, a young man, the most original fellow in the world, who slept I know not how many hours with his head on my shoulder. Now and then he roused himself to exclaim in a lamentable voice, “Ah what a night! what a horrible night!” without perceiving that with his head he gave me an additional reason for making the same lament.

At the first stopping-place we both alighted and entered a little hostelry to get a glass of liquor; my fellow-traveller asked me if I was travelling on business. “No, sir,” I replied; “I am travelling for pleasure; and you, if I may ask?”—“I am travelling for love,” he replied with perfect gravity.—“For love!—” And then, unasked, he told me a long story of an unhappy love-affair, of a deferred marriage, of abductions and duels, and I know not what else; and finally he said he was travelling for a change of scene to help him forget the lady of his affections. And, in fact, he sought distraction to the top of his bent, for at every inn where we stopped, from the beginning of our journey until we arrived at Gerona, he did nothing but tease the maids—always with the utmost gravity, it is true, but nevertheless with an audacity which even his desire for distraction failed to justify.

Three hours after midnight we arrived at the frontier. “Estamos en España!” (We are in Spain!) cried a voice. The diligence came to a stop. The American and I leaped again to the ground, and with great curiosity entered a little inn to see the first sons of Spain within the walls of a Spanish house.

We found a half-dozen customs officials, the host, his wife, and children sitting around a brasier. They greeted us at once. I asked a number of questions, and they answered in an open, spirited manner, which I had not expected to find among the Catalans, who are described in the gazetteers as a rude people of few words. I asked if they had anything to eat, and they brought in the famous Spanish chorizo, a sort of sausage, which is overseasoned with pepper and burns the stomach, a bottle of sweet wine, and some hard bread.

“Well; what is your king doing?” I asked of an official after I had spit out the first mouthful. The man to whom I spoke seemed embarrassed, looked first at me, then at the others, and finally made this very strange answer: “Esta reinando” (He is reigning). They all commenced to laugh, and while I was preparing a closer question, I became conscious of a whisper in my ear: “Es un republicano” (He is a republican). I turned and saw mine host looking into the air. “I understand,” said I, and changed the subject. When we had climbed again into the diligence my companion and I had a good laugh over the warning of the host, and we both expressed our surprise that a person of his class should have taken the political opinions of the officials so seriously; but at the inns where we afterward stopped we learned better. In every one of them we found the host or some adventurer reading the paper to a group of attentive peasants. Now and then the reading would be interrupted by a political discussion, which I could not understand, because they used the Catalan dialect, but I could get the drift of what they were saying by the aid of the paper which I had heard them reading. Well, I must say, among all of those groups there circulated a current of republican thought which would have made the stoutest royalist tremble. One of them, a man with a fierce scowl and a deep voice, after he had spoken a short time to a group of silent auditors, turned to me, whom by my impure Castilian accent he supposed to be a Frenchman, and said with great solemnity, “Let me tell you something, caballero!”—“What is it?”—“I tell you,” he replied, “that Spain is in a worse plight than France;” and after that remark he began walking up and down the room with bowed head and with his arms crossed upon his breast. Others spoke confusedly of the Cortes, of the ministry, of political ambitions, breaches of faith, and other dreadful things. One person only, a girl at a restaurant in Figueras, noticing that I was an Italian, said to me with a smile, “Now we have an Italian king.” And a little while later, as we were going out, she added with graceful simplicity, “I like him.”

When we arrived at Gerona it was still night. There King Amadeus, after a joyful welcome, placed a stone in the house where General Alvarez lodged during the famous siege of 1809.

We passed through the city, which seemed to us of great proportions, sleepy as we were and impatient to tumble into our corners of the railroad carriage. Finally we reached the station, and by dawn were on our way to Barcelona.

Sleep! It was the first time I had seen the sun rise in Spain. How could I have slept? I put my face close to the window, and did not turn my head until we came to Barcelona. Ah! there is no greater pleasure than that one feels upon entering an unfamiliar country, with one’s imagination prepared for the sight of new and wonderful objects, with a thousand memories of the fanciful descriptions of books in one’s head, free from anxiety and free from care.

To press forward into that land, to bend one’s glance eagerly in every direction in search of something which will convince one, if he is not already sure of the fact, that he is really there—to grow conscious of it little by little, now by the dress of a peasant, now by a tree, again by a house; to notice as one advances the growing frequency of those signs, those colors, those forms, and to compare all those things with the mental picture one had previously formed; to find a field for curiosity in everything upon which the eye rests or which strikes the ear,—the appearance of the people, their gestures, their accent, their conversation,—the exclamations of surprise at every step. To feel one’s mind expanding and growing clear; so long to arrive at once and yet never to arrive; to ask a thousand questions of one’s companions; to make a sketch of a village or of a group of peasants; to say ten times an hour, “I am here!” and to think of telling all about it some day,—this is truly the liveliest and most varied of human pleasures. The American was snoring.

The part of Catalonia through which one passes from Gerona to Barcelona is a varied, fertile, and highly-cultivated country. It is a succession of little valleys flanked by gently sloping hills, with tracts of heavy woodland, roaring streams, gorges, and