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F EW travellers have leisure enough to traverse the wide realm of tawny Spain in its every part. Those who must confine their attention to a single province naturally select Andalusia, where all the Northerner's preconceptions of the South find realization. The wild scenery of Southern Spain, the gay open-air life of the people, the monuments attesting the splendour of the extinct civilization of the Moor, the spell of romance which still holds its cities, makes this land one of the most interes

C ADIZ was the prettiest of all the towns of Spain, thought Byron. I would rather say that she was the most beautiful. She rises out of the sea—the boundless salt ocean that stretches from pole to pole—and the crests of the waves which lick her feet are not whiter than her walls. And these by day are bathed in liquid gold, for the sun seems to linger here ere he says good-night to Europe. By night the city gleams like washed silver, and her sheen is more magical than that of the dark yet phospho

SEVILLE—A STREET SEVILLE—A STREET S EVILLE , in the glory of the Andalusian summer, is a city of white and gold. Her brilliancy dazzles you, as it dazzled those who wrote of her, a little wildly, as the eighth wonder of the world. Luis Guevara, a poet born within her walls, declared that she was not the eighth but the first of those wonders. In our own day, men of genius have felt her spell. "Seville," says Valdés, "has ever been for me the symbol of light, the city of love and joy." So much few

T HE sands of Asia are strewn with the ruins of cities once the gorgeous capitals of mighty empires. Here in Spain the followers of the Prophet raised a metropolis as splendid as any of the new Babylons of the East; and its fall has been wellnigh as great as theirs. We need not credit all the assertions of the Arabian writers (for the scribes of that nation, as Cervantes remarks, are not a little addicted to fiction). We can hardly believe that Cordova in its prime contained 300,000 inhabitants,

O VER two thousand feet above the sea stands the ancient city of Granada, once the teeming centre of the kingdom of the Moors and now a town of memories eloquent of the grandeur of older days. The province bearing its name is bounded on the north by sterile ranges, while close to the southern seaboard stretch the huge shoulders and serrated peaks of the noble Sierra Nevada, rivalling in height the chief summits of the Pyrenees. Between these ranges spread fertile vegas, or plains, rising here an

S ECOND in size among Andalusian cities, Malaga is the least interesting. Were it not for the sea, its position would be one of singular remoteness. On the extreme verge of Europe, the mighty Sierra Nevada rises behind it, and cuts it off from the rest of Spain. Yet as a flourishing port it is one of the towns in the Peninsula best known among Englishmen. It is beloved by our sailors. From the odd phases of life to be seen in and around the harbour, they derive their notions of the people and th

A T Bobadilla—the Clapham Junction of Andalusia—the Spanish railway system is joined by the line of that purely British undertaking, the Algeciras Railway Company. A Spaniard told me that this line would never have been built by one of his countrymen, as no one in Spain had any desire to facilitate Gibraltar's communication with England, and the country it traversed had been sufficiently opened up. I do not think it would be difficult to demonstrate that the line may prove of very substantial be

RONDA—ROMAN BRIDGES RONDA—ROMAN BRIDGES T HE province of Murcia resembles the home of the Arab race more closely than does any other part of Europe. It is a wild, fierce region, hot and tawny like a lion's hide, furrowed by deep winding ravines, intersected by serrated mountains, on whose flanks, for the heat of the sun, no green thing can grow. Much of the land is occupied by plateaux, bare and rocky like great altars on which all that lives is offered to and consumed by the sun. From these upl

T HE southernmost position of the ancient kingdom of Valencia belongs geographically and historically to Murcia. The huerta in which Orihuela stands is a continuation of the huerta of Murcia, and in the town itself we recognize the Aurariola which was the capital of the latter kingdom. I did not stop at Orihuela, but I understand that it remains distinct from all other towns in Valencia, in that its people speak pure Castilian. For that variety of the Romance tongue which I may denominate Catala