try was cold and barren and abounded in
rock-strewn plains, to which the grey skies gave a still more sad and
sombre tone. We approached Lerida when the shades of night were falling,
and could just discern its grand outlines rising out of the great plain.
These seemed to yield in interest only to Manresa, whilst the town
itself proved far more attractive.

We found the place sufficiently civilised to possess an omnibus, which
transported us bag and baggage to the hotel. The long straight
thoroughfare in which we found ourselves looked in the darkening night
like the fag end of a village, unfinished and unpaved; almost like the
street of some far away colonial settlement. It was wide and lined with
trees, and beyond the trees on one side, a row of large houses; amongst
them our inn; a rambling, cheerless sort of building, too new to be
peopled with ghosts or distinguished by artistic outlines. Anything more
opposite to the ghostly element could not be imagined. Still, in spite
of frightful drawbacks it was some degrees better than Manresa.

We were conducted by a curious but amiable duenna to a large lofty
sitting room with a bedroom opening on each side: evidently the state
apartments. The place looked empty and neglected, and our candles hardly
lighted the obscurity. The electric bells were all broken, and we soon
found that if we rang till doomsday no one appeared.

Our duenna was toothless and apparently voiceless, for when she opened
her capacious mouth and began to talk, no sound came forth. The mouth
worked up and down in absolute silence, and the effect was creepy and
peculiar. It almost felt as though a mummy had been galvanised into life
minus the voice. Her costume had nothing redeeming about it. An
impromptu turban placed over a shock head of hair, petticoats of the
shortest, revealing feet and ankles that would have supported a
substantial Dutch vrouw. We afterwards found she was the laundress of
the establishment, and this was the costume in which she presided at the
wash-tub. She smiled sweetly upon H. C. and her face looked like a huge,
amiable cavern. With an imagination full of the lovely face of that
young novice in Manresa, he shuddered, dropped into the furthest chair,
and begged us to complete the arrangements without him.

There was nothing to arrange, and the Dragon soon withdrew with her
cavernous smiles and voiceless words. Then from a distant corner we
heard an anxious murmur: "What about di