their way
to Cadiz beyond, where she sits throned on the other side of the bay,
"like a silver cup" glistening in the sunshine, when sunshine there is.
The silver cup to which the Gaditanos are fond of comparing their city
looked more like dirty pewter as I approached it by water from Puerto;
but I was in a tub of a steamer, there was a heavy sea on and a heavy
mist out, and perhaps I was qualmish. Not for its booksellers' shops,
for its demolished convent, or for its vulgar Atlantic did this Puerto,
which the guide-books pass curtly by as "uninteresting," impress me as
interesting, but for two features that no seasoned traveller could,
would, or should overlook; its female population is the most attractive
in Andalusia, and it is the seat of an agreeable English colony. I
happened on the latter in a manner that is curious, so curious as to
merit relation.

I had intended to proceed to Cadiz from Seville after I had taken a peep
at Puerto, but that little American gentleman whom I met at Cordoba was
with me, and persuaded me to stop by the story of a wonderful castle
prison, a sort of _Tour de Nesle_, which was to be seen in the vicinity,
where the _bonne amie_ of a King of Spain had been built up in the good
old times when monarchs raised favourites from the gutter one day, and
sometimes ordered their weazands to be slit the next. This show-place is
about a league from Puerto, in the valley of Sidonia, and is called El
Castillo de Dona Blanca. We took a calesa to go there. My companion
objected to travelling on horseback; he could not stomach the peculiar
Moorish saddle with its high-peaked cantle and crupper, and its
catch-and-carry stirrups. We took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying
day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary
to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the
driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table
at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern of those
employed to beautify genteel coffins, remove the cushions, and replace
them with a wisp of straw, smash the springs, and put swing-leathers
underneath instead, cover the whole article with a coating of liquid
mud, leave it to dry in a mouldy place where the rats shall have free
access to the leather for gnawing practice, return in seven years, and
you will find a tolerably correct imitation of that decayed machine, the
Andalusian calesa. It is more pictu