Aqui se veve bino y aguaardiente_--meaning, _Aqui
se bebe vino_, etc. (Here may be drunk wine).

The two letters are, in fact, almost interchangeable in sound, but the
educated Spaniard never, of course, makes the illiterate mistake of
transposing them in writing. The sound of _b_ is much more liquid than
in English, and to pronounce _Barcelona_ as a Castilian pronounces it,
we should spell it _Varcelona_; the same with _Cordoba_, which to our
ears sounds as if written _Cordova_, and so, in fact, we English spell
it.

Spaniards, as a rule, speak English with an excellent accent, having all
the sounds that the English possess, taking the three kingdoms, England,
Scotland, and Ireland, into account.

Our _th_, which is unpronounceable to French, Italians, and Germans,
however long they may have lived in England, comes naturally to the
Spaniard, because in his own _d_, soft _c_, and _z_ he has the sounds of
our _th_ in "_th_ee" and "_th_in." His _ch_ is identical with ours, and
his _j_ and _x_ are the same as the Irish and Scotch pronunciation of
_ch_ and _gh_.

The Spanish language is not difficult to learn--at any rate to read and
understand--because there are absolutely no unnecessary letters, if we
except the initial _h_, which is, or appears to us, silent--and the
pronunciation is invariable. What a mine of literary treasure is opened
to the reader by a knowledge of Spanish, no one who is ignorant of that
majestic and poetic language can imagine. With the single exception of
Longfellow's beautiful rendering of the _Coplas de Manrique_, which is
absolutely literal, while preserving all the grace and dignity of the
original, I know of no translation from the Spanish which gives the
reader any real idea of the beauty of Spanish literature in the past
ages, nor even of such works of to-day as those of Juan Valera and some
others.

Picturesque and poetic ideas seem common to the Spaniard to-day, as
ever. Only the other day, in discussing the monument to be erected to
Alfonso XII. in Madrid, one of the newspapers reported the
suggestion--finally adopted, I think--that it should be an equestrian
statue of the young King, "with the look on his face with which he
entered Madrid after ending the Carlist war." What a picture it summons
to the imagination of the boy King--for he was no more--in the pride of
his conquest of the elements of disorder and of civil war, which had so
long distracted his beloved country--a success