I never again
had an opportunity of correcting the impression, I have no objection
to its being considered an uncharitable one; but I wandered for a time
amid the abominations of its streets and squares, in the vain hope
that I had got involved among a congregation of stables and outhouses;
but when I was, at length, compelled to admit it as the miserable
apology for the fair city that I had seen from the harbour, I began to
contemplate, with astonishment, and no little amusement, the very
appropriate appearance of its inhabitants.

The church, I concluded, had, on that occasion, indulged her numerous
offspring with a holiday, for they occupied a much larger portion of
the streets than all the world besides. Some of them were languidly
strolling about, and looking the sworn foes of time, while others
crowded the doors of the different coffee-houses; the fat
jolly-looking friars cooling themselves with lemonade, and the lean
mustard-pot-faced ones sipping coffee out of thimble-sized cups, with
as much caution as if it had been physic.

The next class that attracted my attention was the numerous collection
of well-starved dogs, who were indulging in all the luxury of extreme
poverty on the endless dung-heaps.

There, too, sat the industrious citizen, basking in the sunshine of
his shop-door, and gathering in the flock which is so bountifully
reared on his withered tribe of children. There strutted the spruce
cavalier, with his upper-man furnished at the expense of his lower,
and looking ridiculously imposing: and there--but sacred be their
daughters, for the sake of _one_, who shed a lustre over her squalid
sisterhood, sufficiently brilliant to redeem their whole nation from
the odious sin of ugliness. I was looking for an official person,
living somewhere near the Convent D'Estrella, and was endeavouring to
express my wishes to a boy, when I heard a female voice, in broken
English, from a balcony above, giving the information I desired. I
looked up, and saw a young girl, dressed in white, who was loveliness
itself! In the few words which passed between us, of lively
unconstrained civility on her part, and pure confounded gratitude on
mine, she seemed so perfectly after my own heart, that she lit a torch
in it which burnt for two years and a half.

It must not detract from her merits that she was almost the only one
that I saw during that period in which it was my fate to tread war's
roughest, rudest path,--daily sta