in the great salt sea in their laced waistcoats
and cocked-hats, have fired and frowned at a
thousand times.

We must return. Friend Pepe puts me on
board the Saint Mary steamer, that is now
snorting angrily at delaying passengers; and
snorting like a war-horse thirsting for the
charge. I humour the monster, and go on
board, Pepe saying "Ombre," I have paid
him too little; but he laughs as he says
it, and lights a cigarette, which he takes
from the hollow rim of his black montero
cap.

The boat is full of little cane cages of
emerald-necked pigeons; frails of grapes,
covered with vine-boughs, already drooping
with the intense sunheat; protuberant
melons, the white netting over which I
spend some time in trying to decipher;
being quite sure it was a congeries of old
Asiatic inscriptions, now unreadable except
by afrites.

The deck is crowded with people: neat,
thin, rather short men, in light summery
jackets, and canvas shoes. One I observe in
a yellow nankeen jacket, with black spots.
All have the red faja (sash), and the round
turban cap. The richer wear white linen
jackets, and leghorn hats, lined with black,
sit on their portmanteaus smoking, and
are easy and courteous in their manner.
There are a few real Andalucian dandies,
with puce-coloured and chestnut-coloured
jackets, the sleeves and edgings covered
with figured velvet, their gaiters hung with
leather fringes, like Indian mocassins, knives
in their bright red sashes, and their leggings
embroidered like those the Albanian wears.
Of course there are frolicking brown children,
that skim about like birds, and mothers
and sweethearts by the dozen. The women
have no bonnets, nothing but the graceful,
nun-like mantilla, drawn jealously over the
face, or streaming over the neck; long black
rays (which the world calls eyelashes),
darting from their passionate eyes, and black fans
that never are still. Look at the Zuleika
who sits on the low camp-stool, with her
back to those immense oleanders planted in
olive-oil jars which are going to the Don
Sanchez Montilla, the very wine-merchant of
Xeres to whom I have letters of introduction
in the ambuscade of my left-hand pocket.
How beautiful she is! not beautiful with the
rose-blood of English beauty; but beautiful
with a pale, spiritual light in her colourless
brown face. Her black hair, profuse as
Cleopatra's, is braided in loops round her
ears; which are pink as sea-shells. A great
gold pin below her high comb of pierced tortoise-
shell, fastens up her back hair. She has
not those dangerous little side-curls gummed
over the temples which the Spaniards call
picardias (rogueries). There are blood-red
cloves in her hair, and she trifles back the lace
folds of her mantilla with her fan to prevent
their being ruffled. She talks playfully with an
old Figaro, who has a heavy club of a stick,
with a brass lion couchant as a handle. Is she
going to play at work: to net, to sew? No.
She unfastens a bundle which she takes from
her reticule: a luncheon of those famed
Cadiz dainties, the "bocas de la Isla,"—
small pink and white claws torn from the
living crabs that frequent the marshes of San
Fernando. How she sucks and cracks them;
caring no more about the maimed creatures
stumping about the marshes like so many
armless Chelsea pensioners, than I do for
the men who fell at Agincourt.

We touch the shore and hurry to the railway
station, with one backward glance at the
vessels laden with fragrant empty wine casks;
now soulless and disenchanted; no longer
caskets of hope and love, joy, death, and
madness: mere hollow hooped-up barrels,
yellow or red, lined with a dry crust of
tartarous-looking dregs. The carriages are
comfortable, and filled with wine merchants
and their clerks returning from bathing at
this port. We are now at Saint Mary's;
which is the shipping port of the wine
district of Cadiz. A demon scream, a champ
as of a thousand horses, and we are away on
the wings of the wind to the region of your
nutty, full flavoured, unbrandied,
Amontillado sherry, the golden juice I have so
often held up to the light with ridiculous
affectation of knowingness; the stuff, to use
Binn's the wine merchant's affectionate
phrase, that Falstaff grew witty and racy
on, and called his sherris sack—by which
he meant the seco, dry wine of Xeres or
Cheres. The guttural X rather teases an
Englishman.

But to see, as Pepys would say, the
dusty barrenness of the country! Why it is
mere white, sun-baked, turnpike road turned
into fields; sprinkled here and there with
patches of melons and tufts of the Indian
corn now just in tassel. The hedges are lines
of cactuses and prickly-pears growing in a dry
bloodless, eccentric manner, and looking like
spiky fish turned into  vegetables; or—especially
the prickly-pear—like a collection of
green hairbrushes that have stuck together
at all sorts of odd angles, and so taken
root.

But what are those hills of stony shifting
chalk that look like railway embankments,
and are studded with stunted green
gooseberry bushes? Those are the real sherry
vines. One small shed of a station, and we are
at Xeres.

I—disdaining a certain mild stupor and
desire of sleep, which, even just after
breakfast, will sometimes come over you in
Spain—push past the expectant omnibus and
a mosquito swarm of hungry boys who want
to act as guides and show me the cellars
(the bodegas), and toil up the city's long, hot
streets, past clanging cooperages, blue-domed
collegiatas, and long barrack wine stores;
past the flame-shaped battlements of the