e British public know the shameful way he and his
priests were treated by the Government They had not drawn a penny of
salary for three years. This was a fact; and very discreditable it was
to the Government, and a good explanation of the disloyalty of their
reverences. If a contract is made it should be kept; the State
contracted to support the Church, but since Queen Isabella decamped the
State had forgotten its engagement.

Puerto de Santa Maria deserves the name it has got. It is a clean and
shapely collection of houses, regularly built. People in England are apt
to associate the idea of filth with Spain; this, at least in Andalusia,
is a mistake. The cleanliness is Flemish. Soap and the scrubbing-brush
are not spared; linen is plentiful and spotless, and water is used for
other purposes than correcting the strength of wine. Walking down the
long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its
straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies
and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in
Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not
turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. I am
speaking now of fine days; but there are days when the sky is cloudy and
the wind blows, and the waters in the Bay of Cadiz below surge up sullen
and yeasty, and there are days when the rain comes down quick, thick,
and heavy as from a waterspout, and the streets are turned for the
moment into rivulets. But the effects of the rain do not last long;
Spain is what washerwomen would call a good drying country. Beyond its
neatness and tidiness, Puerto has other features to recommend it to the
traveller. It has a bookseller's shop, where the works of Eugene Sue and
Paul de Kock can be had in choice Spanish, side by side with the Carlist
Almanack, "by eminent monarchical writers," and the calendar of the
Saragossan prophet (the Spanish Old Moore); but it is not to that I
refer--half a hundred Andalusian towns can boast the same. It has its
demolished convent, but since the revolution of '68 that is no more a
novelty than the Alameda, or sand-strewn, poplar-planted promenade,
which one meets in every Spanish hamlet. It has the Atlantic waves
rolling in at its feet, and a pretty sight it is to mark the feluccas,
with single mast crossed by single yard, like an unstrung bow, moored by
the wharf or with outspread sail bellying before the breeze on