ancient castles; clothed with a vegetation luxuriant and hardy and of a varied green, which reminds one of the severe aspect of the Alpine valleys. The landscape is enlivened by the picturesque dress of the peasants, which corresponds admirably to the fierceness of the Catalan character. The first peasants I saw were dressed from top to toe in black velvet, and wore about their necks a sort of shawl with red and white stripes, and on their heads little Zouave caps of bright red falling to the shoulder. Some wore a sort of buskin of skins laced to the knee, others a pair of canvas shoes shaped like slippers, with corded soles, open in front, and tied about the foot with interlacing black ribbons—a habit, in fine, easy and elegant, and at the same time severe. The weather was not very cold, but they were all bundled up in their shawls, so that only the tip of the nose or the end of the cigarette was to be seen. They had the air of gentlemen coming from the theatre. This effect is produced not merely by the shawls, but by the manner in which they are worn—falling at the side, so that the arrangement appears accidental, with those plaits and foldings which add the grace of a mantilla and dignity of a cloak. At every railway-station there was a group of men, each wearing a shawl of different color, and not a few dressed in fine new cloth: almost all were very clean, and all had a dignity of bearing which heightened the effect of their picturesque costume. There were a few dark faces, but most of them were fair, with lively black eyes, lacking, however, the fire and vivacity of the Andalusian glances.

Gradually as one advances the villages, houses, bridges, and aqueducts become most frequent, with all those things which announce the proximity of a rich and populous commercial city. Granallers, Sant’ Andrea de Palomar, and Clot are surrounded by factories, villas, parks, and gardens. All along the way one sees long rows of carts, troops of peasants, and herds of cattle; the stations are crowded with passengers. If one did not know where he was, he might think he was crossing a part of England rather than a province of Spain. Once past the station of Clot, the last stop before the arrival at Barcelona, one sees on every side huge brick buildings, long walls, heaps of building material, smoking chimneys, stacks of workshops, and many laboring-men, and hears, or imagines he hears, a muffled roar, growing in extent and volume, which seems like the labored breathing of a great city at its work. At last one can see all Barcelona—at a glance the harbor, the sea, a coronet of hills—and it all appears and disappears in a moment, and you are sitting in the station with tingling nerves and a confused brain.

A diligence as large as a railway-carriage took me to a neighboring hotel, when, as soon as I entered, I heard the Italian speech. I confess that this was as great a pleasure as if I had been an interminable distance from Italy and a year absent from home. But it was a pleasure of short duration. A porter, the same one whom I had heard speaking, showed me to my room, and, doubtless assured by my smile that I was a fellow-countryman, asked politely,

“Have you made an end of arriving?”

“Made an end of arriving?” I asked in my turn, elevating my eyebrows.

I must here note that in Spanish the word acabor (to make an end of doing a thing) corresponds to the French expression venir de la faire. Consequently I did not at once understand what he said.

“Yes,” the porter replied, “I ask the cavaliere if he has alighted the selfsame hour from the way of iron?”

“Selfsame hour? Way of iron? What sort of Italian is this, my friend?”

He was a little disconcerted.

However, I afterward discovered that there is in Barcelona a large number of hotel-porters, of waiters in the restaurants, cooks, and servants of all kinds—Piedmontese for the most part from the province of Navarre—who have lived in Spain from boyhood and speak this dreadful jargon composed of French, Italian, Castilian, Catalan, and Piedmontese. However, they do not use this dialect in addressing the Spanish people, for they all know Spanish, but only to Italian travellers in a playful spirit, to let them see that they have not forgotten the speech of their fatherland.

This explains the fact that I have heard many Catalonians say, “Oh! there is very little difference between your language and ours.” I should think so! I ought also to repeat the words which a Castilian singer addressed to me in a tone of lofty benevolence as we were conversing on the boat which bore me to Marseilles five weeks later: “The Italian language is the most beautiful of the dialects formed from ours.”

As soon as I removed the traces which the horrible night of the crossing of the Pyrenees had left upon me I sallied forth from the hotel and began to wander about the streets.

Barcelona is, in appearance, the least Spanish of the cities of Spain. Great buildings—very few of which are old—long streets, regular squares, shops, theatres, large and splendid restaurants, a continuous moving throng of people, carriages, and carts from the water front to the centre of the city, and thence to the outskirts, just as at Genoa, Naples, and Marseilles. A very wide, straight street called the Rambla, shaded by two rows of trees, divides the city from the harbor to the hills. A fine promenade, flanked by new houses, stretches along the sea-shore above a high dyke of masonry built like a terrace, against which the waves beat. A suburb of vast proportions, almost another city, extends toward the north, and on every side new houses break the old enclosure, spread over the fields, even to the foot of the hills, range themselves in endless rows until they reach the neighboring villages, and on all the circling hills rise villas and palaces and factories, which dispute the land and crowd each other as they rise even higher and higher, forming a noble coronet about the brow of the city. Everywhere they are creating, transforming, renewing; the people work and prosper, and Barcelona flourishes.

I saw the last days of the Carnival. Through the streets passed long processions of giants, devils, princes, clowns, warriors, and crowds of certain figures whom I always have the misfortune to encounter the world over. They were dressed in yellow and carried long staves, at the ends of which purses were bound: these they stick under every one’s nose, into the shops and windows, even to the second stories of the houses, begging alms—in whose name I know not, but which were most likely spent in some classic orgy at the close of the Carnival.

The most curious sight which I saw was the

Barcelona

masquerade of the children. It is the custom to dress the boys under the age of eight years like men, after the French fashion, in complete ball-dress, with white gloves, great moustaches, and long flowing hair: some are dressed like the Spanish grandees, bedecked with ribbons and bangles; others like Catalan peasants, with the jaunty cap and the mantle. The little girls appear as court-ladies, Amazons, and