ing at their head. They wheel at our corner in a precisely mathematical right angle, and away to their barracks in the old fortress on Mount Urgull. Their uniform, blue and red, might easily be mistaken for that of the French, except for the peculiar white cap, characteristically Spanish. They are small men, as a rule, young and even boyish-looking. One regards them now with the heightened interest we give to that over which a melancholy fate may be impending. For the destination of most Spanish troops now is Cuba, and, in the country itself, the war in Cuba is regarded as an almost hopeless affair. They hardly expect to reduce and retain their rebellious colony, but they say they must put forth all their efforts for the pundonor, the point of honor: they must not consent to the dismemberment of their territory. Surely there is less than usual in this kind of a motive to lighten the gloomy prospect of death in battle or by jungle fever.

Long before eight the newsboys had been crying the morning paper; and, indeed, while taking my coffee, I had often read many a column of it. "The Voice!" they would cry. "The Voice!" "The Voice of Guipúzcoa!" I wish I could accurately represent the lamenting and musical tone. Guipúzcoa is the province, and prosperous San Sebastian, population 28,ooo, its capital. There is hardly any such good plan for making an intimate acquaintance with a town as to read its local paper on the spot. It is better than guides, better even than intelligent friends, who insist on showing you only what is extraordinary in the place, whereas it is the ordinary and usual that are often the most novel to the stranger, and always the most abounding in real interest. This Voice is a good newspaper, even after American ideas, with plenty of local news. It tells who goes and who comes. Plenty of grandees of Spain among the arrivals. But there are plenty left to go elsewhere, too,

for at Biarritz are registered, all at one time, not less than six dukes, with such famous names as those of Alba, Bejar, Fernan Nuñez, and Prim. San Sebastian and Biarritz supplemented each other, the residents of each country easily getting a complete change of air by going to the other. This would be the case even more but for the tedious custom-house delay at the frontier. On bull-fighting days excursionists pour over from France by thousands. The arena is but a step from the station, and, the spectacle finished, they storm the trains in a scene of wild animation. An effort to keep all these people and their money at home, by opening bull rings there, was the cause of the late tumults in the south of France, for the more humane French Government would not have it.

Our newspaper announces the speedy coming of the foremost bullfighters of Spain, Guerrita and Mazzantini, for the great functions about August 15th. It announces also the Señoritas Toreras, quite a new sensation in the field, a company of young girl bull-fighters, none of them more than seventeen years old. It says that the Queen Regent will visit, to-morrow, the cruiser lying in the harbor. We shall probably be able to see her. It says that the famous statesman, Castelar, is staying at the Villa Triana. Good! we must look out for him, on the promenade or the terrace of the Casino. It announces the Choristers of Clavé. This is a convention of popular singing societies, who come in a few days later, and fill the town with their banners

and red Phrygian caps. They sing in the arena, devoting that place of blood for once to something worthier than the torture of poor animals. But it is mismanaged, and the choristers are exposed, under the open sky, to a heavy downpour of rain, and are soaked to the skin.

One could wish that the Voice were not quite so bitter in its tone toward Cuba; but this very bitterness is a useful indication of the prevailing discouragement. about the struggle.

"If the worst comes to the worst," we find it saying, "let us leave only, to the

Smachtene

Santa Maria-the Old Church.

negroes, who will inherit the island, a smoking heap of ruins."

However, it pitches into the Ayuntamiento, the municipal government, almost as fiercely. Its standing grievance is the lack of enterprise of the city fathers: they do not give fêtes enough; they do nothing whatever to draw in the strangers and increase the prosperity of the town. "Nothing is heard of, on all sides," it exclaims indignantly," but the sloth, the parsimony and criminal negligence of our local rulers." Again it essays biting sarcasm, and imagines a mock programme of public festivities as follows:

1. At daylight, grand procession of ash-carts and milkmen, going their rounds. 2. Firing of the mid-day gun-in case

the gunner does not chance to forget it. 3. Grand procession of shop-girls, going to and from their work.-Unsurpassed display of fetching style and grace. Grand reading of the afternoon penny papers at the cafés. Economical diversion this, in no way deleterious to health." And so on and so forth.

However valid these complaints may be, it is certain that San Sebastian is progressing at a rapid rate in spite of them. Its selection as a summer residence by the court, and the building of the villa for the Queen Regent, a few years ago, cannot fail of producing yet more extensive effects. There are but few villas as yet, but whole streets and whole quarters of six-story apartment houses, on the usual foreign

plan, are going up. There is even a new cathedral building, for it is too far now for dwellers in the modern quarter to go over to old Santa Maria, in the old town. Santa Maria is a characteristic specimen of the Plateresque style, the silversmiths' style, so called from the fantastic floriations in which it liked to indulge; but the new cathedral is about such modern Gothic as can be found in any American town. When they come to build, they seem to like to throw away completely all the grand traditions of their past.

At first sight San Sebastian seems much too new and

too French, in the modern way, to correspond to any romantic ideas. But it is a place that grows upon you, for one reason or another, and you find it daily more Spanish. Its greatest charm is in its wide, clean streets, which, with their frequent arcades, resemble those of Turin, and in the lovely scenery that surrounds them. At the end of each of them is seen a mountain vista, one of those blue and sunny landscapes that seem as if they must

and though so many of them come from far away. Then again, and quite on the other hand, it is Spanish in the seriousness, and even austerity, seen in many externals. There are no café-concerts, no dancinggardens, as in France; the merry sound of the guitar and of the castanets is not heard in the land. In the shop windows not only are there not seen the defiant improprieties of the French, just over the border, but not even the portrait of a pretty actress. The pictures consist entirely of the "holy familys" and "martyrdoms" by the early masters.

be the very abode of ideal happiness. As there are shops on the ground floors, you see none of those sighing lovers at the gratings of lower windows, as in older Spanish towns, comiendo hierro, "eating iron," as the saying is. But in compensation nearly every window above has its balcony, and for these balconies are prepared an elaborate set of hangings, white with deep yellow or scarlet borders, and the like, which are put out on all possible

occasions.

The place is Spanish in the good-natured tendency of its denizens to be amused, and easily amused, and also in a certain lack of cosmopolitanism among them, even among those that seem fashionable,

Even the seaside "souvenirs," made of small shells and mother of pearl, take on the form of crucifixes and rosaries. The war, the pensiveness of the widowed Queen, and the peculiar character of the Basque blood account in part for the seriousness here, but in the main it is a true Spanish trait. Despite the bullfights, the Spanish are as Puritan in their way as the Scotch are in theirs. Various of their

modern books, like Perez Galdós's "Doña Perfecta"

and Palacio Valdés's "Marta y Maria," correctly picture this severe ideal of decorum. Spain, indeed, is a country that, as the expression goes, "a girl can take her mother to."

You are not allowed to forget here that you are not merely in Spain, but in the Basque Provinces. Guipúzcoa is one of these provinces; Álava is a second, with its capital, Vitoria, the railroad junction whither the Queen Regent goes to see the troops off for Cuba; and Biscaya is the third, with Bilbao for its capital, a city marked by such great activity in iron industries just now that it is like a second Pittsburg. The Basques lay claim to be a peculiar people, all noble, and their origin