^OTES^Xi^EAf^ 



A. 



,1 '* ^ 



To the Editor of "The American Journal of Horticulture and Florist's Companion." 



Sir, — In what I write, you of course understand that I can only endeavor 

 to give you a shght account of some things that may more particularly fall under 

 my notice, — accounts necessarily superficial and imperfect, and sometimes, I 

 fear, erroneous. But to attempt more would, I feel, be beyond the compass of my 

 opportunities and ability. No country that I have visited has more completely 

 falsified my previous conceptions of it than Spain (whence I have recently 

 returned), both as regards its moral as well as its physical characteristics. 

 I cannot very well define what those conceptions were, or how obtained. Of 

 Spain I knew but little ; such information as I had being derived from reading 

 occasionally a volume of travels, perhaps a romance of which it was the scene, 

 and current articles from the journals of the day : but in some way I had received 

 an impression that Spain was the one country over which the sun had stood 

 still, where modes of thought and habits of action had remained unchanged, 

 and where men thought and acted as their fathers and grandfathers had before 

 them for generations. True, I knew that wars had ravaged it, that great politi- 

 cal convulsions had occurred, and that its institutions had been somewhat modi- 

 fied or changed, but all, as I supposed, without essentially aflfecting the life of its 

 ])eople ; and so I believe that I expected to find that the Spain of to-day was 

 the Spain of the time of Cervantes, and that Don Quixote and Gil Bias were 

 as true pictures of its actual condition as of the times they were intended to 

 depict. Yet, pre-occupied with such fancy, I failed to meet with any striking 

 warrant of the justice of my previous conception. Peculiarities were, of course, 

 noticeable, — peculiarities of costume, of manners and customs ; but such, and such 

 only, as in all cases help to individualize a nation without making of it a separate 



VOL. IV. 45 353 



