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who pushes on arrives. And after all, a dash of hardship may be endured by those accustomed to loll in easy britzskas, if only for the sake of novelty; what a new relish is given to the palled appetite by a little unknown privation! – hunger being, as Cervantes says, the best of sauces, which, as it never is wanting to the poor, is the reason why eating is their huge delight.

DELIGHTS OF A TOUR

      Again, these sorts of independent expeditions are equally conducive to health of body: after the first few days of the new fatigue are got over, the frame becomes of iron, “hecho de bronze,” and the rider, a centaur not fabulous. The living in the pure air, the sustaining excitement of novelty, exercise, and constant occupation, are all sweetened by the willing heart, which renders even labour itself a pleasure; a new and vigorous life is infused into every bone and muscle: early to bed and early to rise, if it does not make all brains wise, at least invigorates the gastric juices, makes a man forget that he has a liver, that storehouse of mortal misery – bile, blue pill, and blue devils. This health is one of the secrets of the amazing charm which seems inherent to this mode of travelling, in spite of all the apparent hardships with which it is surrounded in the abstract. Oh! the delight of this gipsy, Bedouin, nomade life, seasoned with unfettered liberty! We pitch our tent wherever we please, and there we make our home – far from letters “requiring an immediate answer,” and distant dining-outs, visits, ladies’ maids, band-boxes, butlers, bores, and button-holders.

      Escaping from the meshes of the west end of London, we are transported into a new world; every day the out-of-door panorama is varied; now the heart is cheered and the countenance made glad by gazing on plains overflowing with milk and honey, or laughing with oil and wine, where the orange and citron bask in the glorious sunbeams, the palm without the desert, the sugar-cane without the slave. Anon we are lost amid the silence of cloud-capped glaciers, where rock and granite are tost about like the fragments of a broken world, by the wild magnificence of Nature, who, careless of mortal admiration, lavishes with proud indifference her fairest charms where most unseen, her grandest forms where most inaccessible. Every day and everywhere we are unconsciously funding a stock of treasures and pleasures of memory, to be hived in our bosoms like the honey of the bee, to cheer and sweeten our after-life, when we settle down like wine-dregs in our cask, which, delightful even as in the reality, wax stronger as we grow in years, and feel that these feats of our youth, like sweet youth itself, can never be our portion again. Of one thing the reader may be assured, – that dear will be to him, as is now to us, the remembrance of those wild and weary rides through tawny Spain, where hardship was forgotten ere undergone: those sweet-aired hills – those rocky crags and torrents – those fresh valleys which communicated their own freshness to the heart – that keen relish for hard fare, gained and seasoned by hunger sauce, which Ude did not invent – those sound slumbers on harder couch, earned by fatigue, the downiest of pillows – the braced nerves – the spirits light, elastic, and joyous – that freedom from care – that health of body and soul which ever rewards a close communion with Nature – and the shuffling off of the frets and factitious wants of the thick-pent artificial city.

CHOICE OF COMPANIONS

      Whatever be the number of the party, and however they travel, whether on wheels or horseback, admitting even that a pleasant friend pro vehiculo est, that is, is better than a post-chaise, yet no one should ever dream of making a pedestrian tour in Spain. It seldom answers anywhere, as the walker arrives at the object of his promenade tired and hungry, just at the moment when he ought to be the freshest and most up to intellectual pleasures. The deipnosophist Athenæus long ago discovered that there was no love for the sublime and beautiful in an empty stomach, æsthetics yield then to gastronomies, and there is no prospect in the world so fine as that of a dinner and a nap, or siesta afterwards. The pedestrian in Spain, where fleshly comforts are rare, will soon understand why, in the real journals of our Peninsular soldiers, so little attention is paid to those objects which most attract the well-provided traveller. In cases of bodily hardship, the employment of the mental faculties is narrowed into the care of supplying mere physical wants, rather than expanded into searching for those of a contemplative or intellectual gratification; the footsore and way-worn require, according to

      “The unexempt condition

      By which all mortal frailty must subsist,

      Refreshment after toil, ease after pain.”

      Walking is the manner by which beasts travel, who have therefore four legs; those bipeds who follow the example of the brute animals will soon find that they will be reduced to their level in more particulars than they imagined or bargained for. Again, as no Spaniard ever walks for pleasure, and none ever perform a journey on foot except trampers and beggars, it is never supposed possible that any one else should do so except from compulsion. Pedestrians therefore are either ill received, or become objects of universal suspicion; for a Spanish authority, judging of others by himself, always takes the worst view of the stranger, whom he considers as guilty until he proves himself innocent.

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      The word Gabacho, which is the most offensive vituperative of the Spaniard against the Frenchman, and has by some been thought to mean “those who dwell on Gaves,” is the Arabic Cabach, detestable, filthy, or “qui prava indole est, moribusque.” In fact the real meaning cannot be further alluded to beyond referring to the clever tale of El Frances y Español by Quevedo. The antipathy to the Gaul is natural and national, and dates far beyond history. This nickname was first given in the eighth century, when Charlemagne, the Buonaparte of his day, invaded Spain, on the abdication and cession of the crown by the chaste Alonso, the prototype of the wittol Charles IV.; then the Spanish Moors and Christians, foes and friends, forgot their hatreds of creeds in the greater loathing for the abhorred intruder, whose “peerage fell” in the memorable passes of Roncesvalles. The true derivation of the word Gabacho, which now resounds from these Pyrenees to the Straits, is blinked in the royal academical dictionary, such was the servile adulation of the members to their French patron Philip V. Mueran los Gabachos, “Death to the miscreants,” was the rally cry of Spain after the inhuman butcheries of the terrorist Murat; nor have the echoes died away; a spark may kindle the prepared mine: of what an unspeakable value is a national war-cry which at once gives to a whole people a shibboleth, a rallying watch-word to a common cause! Vox populi vox Dei.

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      Razzia is derived from the Arabic Al ghazia, a word which expresses these raids of a ferocious, barbarous age. It has been in

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The word Gabacho, which is the most offensive vituperative of the Spaniard against the Frenchman, and has by some been thought to mean “those who dwell on Gaves,” is the Arabic Cabach, detestable, filthy, or “qui prava indole est, moribusque.” In fact the real meaning cannot be further alluded to beyond referring to the clever tale of El Frances y Español by Quevedo. The antipathy to the Gaul is natural and national, and dates far beyond history. This nickname was first given in the eighth century, when Charlemagne, the Buonaparte of his day, invaded Spain,

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