is bounded on the west by the
town, and on the east by a chain of mountains, a branch of the Sierra of
Oca. Henry the Third, grandfather of Isabel the Catholic, made choice of
this position for the erection of a palace; the only remnant of it now
existing is the church, which has since become the inheritance of the
Carthusian monks, the successors of its royal founder.

The late revolution, after sparing the throne of Spain, displayed a
certain degree of logic, if not in all its acts, at least in sparing,
likewise, two or three of the religious establishments, under the
protection of which the principal royal mausoleums found shelter and
preservation. The great Chartreuse of Xeres contained probably no such
palladium, for it was among the first of the condemned: its lands and
buildings were confiscated; and its treasures of art, and all portable
riches, dispersed, as likewise its inhabitants, in the direction of all
the winds.

In England the name of Xeres is only generally known in connection with
one of the principal objects of necessity, which furnish the table of
the _gastronome_; but in Andalucia the name of Xeres de la Frontera
calls up ideas of a different sort. It is dear to the wanderer in Spain,
whose recollections love to repose on its picturesque position, its
sunny skies, its delicious fruits, its amiable and lively population,
and lastly on its once magnificent monastery, and the treasures of art
it contained. The Prior of that monastery has been removed to the
Cartuja of Burgos, where he presides over a community, reduced to four
monks, who subsist almost entirely on charity. This amiable and
gentleman-like individual, in whom the monk has in no degree injured
the man of the world,--although a large estate, abandoned for the
cloister, proved sufficiently the sincerity of his religious
professions,--had well deserved a better fate than to be torn in his old
age from his warm Andalucian retreat, and transplanted to the rudest
spot in the whole Peninsula, placed at an elevation of more than four
thousand feet above the level of the Atlantic, and visited up to the
middle of June by snow-storms. At the moment I am writing, this innocent
victim of reform is extended on a bed of sickness, having only recently
escaped with his life from an attack, during which he was given over.

This Cartuja possesses more than the historical reminiscences with which
it is connected, to attract the passing tourist. It owes its