r,
and to find out that a motor-car had stopped for a few moments about two
hours ago. There were ladies inside, but they had not got out. A
gentleman, covered with dust, had ordered sherry and biscuits, which he
and the chauffeur had themselves carried to the other passengers,
appearing rather impatient with the waiters. This gentleman had spoken
Spanish in the hotel, but had been heard conversing in English with his
friends. They had remained about fifteen minutes, and had then gone on. A
waiter remembered seeing the chauffeur and his master consulting a
road-map, and had heard the word "Cadiz" spoken.

This gave us an apparently unbroken clue, and half expecting to be caught
in a police-trap, we slipped stealthily out of Jerez, with a spurt of
speed as streets were left behind.

Still we were watched by purple-robed, guardian mountains, sitting in
conclave. A running fire of poppies swept the fields between which we
travelled, while distant meadows were paved with gold, or with
forget-me-not blue like squares of the sky's mosaic fallen out. The air
grew luminous as the crystal bell which hangs over the lagoons of Venice;
and with the subtle change of atmosphere we had in our nostrils the first
tang of the sea.

Here and there a strip of lush green was belted with cactus, but we were
driving through salt marshes, and round us spread a plain piled with
strange, shining pyramids of salt, white and bright as hills of diamond
dust. Then, suddenly, a broken line of turrets and domes and spires was
cut in gleaming pearl against the sky; and it was not the opal clearness
of the air alone which took the memory to Venice. Here was the same ebb
and flow of salt water in glittering lagoons, the same dark, waving lines
of seaweed, the same wide stretch of sapphire beyond the alabaster domes.

For Spain, the road was good, and we glided smoothly through the pretty
old town of Puerta de Santa Maria, with its big bodegas and Byronic
associations. Across the Guadalquivir, where it tumbles into the Atlantic,
dashing through an aromatic forest of umbrella pines we came out at Queen
Isabel's white, Moorish looking Puerto Real. Thence, distant Cadiz on its
rock appeared to change position bewilderingly, like a group of fairy
castles, as we swept round the rim of that semicircular bay where once the
Phoenicians traded in metals of England, and amber of the Baltic; where the
ships of the Great Armada lay; and where Essex wrought destruc