the richest places in Spain; the
houses have an opulent look, and without the help of Baedeker you may
guess that they contain respectable persons with incomes, and carriages
and horses, with frock-coats and gold watch-chains. I like the people of
Jerez; their habitual expression suggests a consciousness that the
Almighty is pleased with them, and they without doubt are well content
with the Almighty. The main street, with its trim shops and its _cafes_,
has the air of a French provincial town--an appearance of agreeable ease
and dulness.

Every building in Jerez is washed with lime, and in the sunlight the
brilliancy is dazzling. You realise then that in Seville the houses are
not white--although the general impression is of a white town--but, on
the contrary, tinted with various colours from faintest pink to pale
blue, pale green; they remind you of the summer dresses of women. The
soft tones are all mingled with the sunlight and very restful. But Jerez
is like a white banner floating under the cloudless sky, the pure white
banner of Bacchus raised defiantly against the gaudy dyes of teetotalism
and its shrieking trumpets.

Jerez the White is, of course, the home of sherry, and the whole town is
given over to the preparation of the grateful juice. The air is
impregnated with a rich smell. The sun shines down on Jerez; and its
cleanliness, its prosperity, are a rebuke to harsh-voiced contemners of
the grape.

You pass _bodega_ after _bodega_, cask-factories, bottle-factories. A
bottle-factory is a curious, interesting place, an immense barn, sombre,
so that the eye loses itself in the shadows of the roof; and the scanty
light is red and lurid from the furnaces, which roar hoarsely and long.
Against the glow the figures of men, half-naked, move silently,
performing the actions of their craft with a monotonous regularity which
is strange and solemn. They move to and fro, carrying an iron instrument
on which is the molten mass of red-hot glass, and it gleams with an
extraordinary warm brilliancy. It twists hither and thither in obedience
to the artisan's deft movements; it coils and writhes into odd shapes,
like a fire-snake curling in the torture of its own unearthly ardour.
The men pass so regularly, with such a silent and exact precision, that
it seems a weird and mystic measure they perform--a rhythmic dance of
unimaginable intricacy, whose meaning you cannot gather and whose
harmony escapes you. The flames leap an