Page:Impressions of Spain in 1866.djvu/18

4 of the historical interest attached to St. Sebastian, we will say nothing : are they not written in the book of the chronicles of Napier and Napoleon ?

The following morning, after a fine and crowded service at the Church of S. Maria, where they first saw the beautifiil Spanish custom of the women being all veiled, and in black, two of the party started at seven in the morning, in a light carriage, for Loyola. The road throughout is beautifiil, reminding one of the Tyrol, with picturesque villages, old Roman bridges, quaint manor-houses, with coats of arms emblazoned over their porticoes ; rapid, clear trout-streams and fine glimpses of snowy mountains on the left, and of the bright blue sea on the right. The flowers too were lovely. There was a dwarf blue bugloss of an intensity of colour which is only equalled by the large forget-me-not on the mountain-sides of Lebanon. The peasants are all small proprie- tors. They were cultivating their fields in the most primitive way, father, mother, and children working the ground with a two-pronged fork like this :

A, called by them a ^laya;' but the result was certainly satisfactory. They speak a language as utterly hopeless for a foreigner to