T HE two great Mediterranean peninsulas which, in opposite quarters, jut southward where—as George Eliot says, in her "Spanish Gypsy"— may not inaptly be likened to a brother and sister, instead of taking their places under the usual similitude of "sister countries." They have points of marked resemblance, in their picturesqueness, their treasures of art, their associations of history and romance; but, just as the physical aspect of Spain and its shape upon the map are broader, more thick-set an

WE took our places, for the performance was about to begin. The scene represented a street in Burgos, the long-dead capital of old Castile. Time: night. Ancient houses on either side the stage narrow back to an archway in the centre, opening through to a pillared walk and a dimly moonlit space beyond. Muffled figures occasionally pass the aperture. Suddenly enters Don Ramiro—or Alvar Nuñez, I really don't know which—and advances toward the front. To our surprise he does not open the play with a

IT was of Spain's past and present that we were speaking, and "What," I asked, "have we given her in return for her discovery of our New World?" "The sleeping-car and the street tramway," answered Velveteen, with justifiable pride. He was right; for we had seen the first on the railroad, and the second skimming the streets of Madrid. Still, the reward did not appear great, measured by the much that Spain's ventures in the Western hemisphere had cost her, and by the comparative desolation of her

THE House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called, used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne—hallowed, perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to

S EVILLE—why should we not keep the proper and more euphonious form, Sevilla?—the home of that Don Juan on whom Byron and Mozart have shed a lustre more enviable than his reputation, has been made familiar to every one by melodious Figaro as well; and more lately Mérimée's Carmen, veiled in the music of Bizet, has brought it into the foreign consciousness again. To me it is memorable as the place where I saw the jars in which the Forty Thieves were smothered. Worried by a painfully profuse odor

A gypsy dance! What does one naturally imagine it to be like? For my part, I had expected something wild, free, and fantastic; something in harmony with moonlight, the ragged shadows of trees, and the flicker of a rude camp-fire. Nothing could have been wider of the mark. The flamenco —that dance of the gypsies, in its way as peculiarly Spanish as the church and the bull-ring, and hardly less important—is of Oriental origin, and preserves the impassive quality, the suppressed, tantalized sensuou

S PAIN is by no means so difficult a country to reach, nor so inconvenient to travel in after one has got there, as is generally supposed. Doubtless the obstacles which it presented to the tourist until within a few years were great; and much that is disagreeable still remains to vex those who are accustomed to the smoother ways, and carefully-oiled machinery for travel, of regions more civilized. But the establishment of a system of railroads, describing an outline that passes through nearly al