en in Italy. With every disposition to serve you, there is nothing like
servility among the Spaniards. The native dignity which characterizes
their demeanor prepossesses me very strongly in their favor. There is but
one dialect of courtesy, and the muleteers and common peasants address
each other with the same grave respect as the Dons and Grandees. My friend
Jose was a model of good-breeding.

I had little trouble either with passport-officers or custom-houses. My
passport, in fact, was never once demanded, although I took the precaution
to have it vised in all the large cities. In Seville and Malaga, it was
signed by the American Consuls, without the usual fee of two
dollars--almost the only instances which have come under my observation.
The regulations of the American Consular System, which gives the Consuls
no salary, but permits them, instead, to get their pay out of travellers,
is a disgrace to our government. It amounts, in effect, to _a direct tax
on travel_, and falls heavily on the hundreds of young men of limited
means, who annually visit Europe for the purpose of completing their
education. Every American citizen who travels in Italy pays a passport tax
of ten dollars. In all the ports of the Mediterranean, there is an
American Vice-Consul, who does not even get the postage paid on his
dispatches, and to whom the advent of a traveller is of course a welcome
sight. Misled by a false notion of economy, our government is fast
becoming proverbial for its meanness. If those of our own citizens who
represent us abroad only worked as they are paid, and if the foreigners
who act as Vice-Consuls without pay did not derive some petty trading
advantages from their position, we should be almost without protection.

* * * * *

With my departure from Spain closes the record of my journey in the Lands
of the Saracen; for, although I afterwards beheld more perfect types of
Saracenic Art on the banks of the Jumna and the Ganges, they grew up under
the great Empire of the descendants of Tamerlane, and were the creations
of artists foreign to the soil. It would, no doubt, be interesting to
contrast the remains of Oriental civilization and refinement, as they
still exist at the extreme eastern and western limits of the Moslem sway,
and to show how that Art, which had its birth in the capitals of the
Caliphs--Damascus and Baghdad--attained its most perfect development in
Spain and India; but my v