Introductory 



to drive your horses or ponies : and sucli offices lie will perform 

 well ; but anything menial, or what he might regard as derogat- 

 ory, he prefers — instinctively, not offensively — to leave to the 

 Galician. From Castile and Navarre comes a different caste, 

 stately and aristocratic by nature, yet with fiery temperament 

 concealed beneath subdued exterior — honestly, we prefer both 

 the preceding exemplars. The Catalan comes next, pushing and 

 effervescent, all for his own little corner, his factories and his 

 trade — impregnated, every man, with a sort of cinematograph 

 of advanced views on social and political questions of the day — 

 borrowed mostly from his up-to-date neighbours beyond the 

 Pyrenees, yet grafted on to old-world fueros, or franchises, that 

 date back to the times of the Counts of Barcelona.^ Perhaps 

 the most perfect example of contemporary natural nobility is 

 afforded by the peasant-proprietor of pastoral Leon ; then there 

 is the Basque of Biscay, Tartar-sprung or Turanian, Finnic, or 

 surviving aboriginal — ^let philologists decide. Among Spain's 

 manifold human types, we suggest to ethnologists (and suggested 

 before, twenty years ago) the study of a surviving remnant that 

 still clings secreted, lonely as lepers, in the far-aw^ay mountains of 

 Northern Estremadura — the Hurdes. These wild tribes of un- 

 known origin (presumed to be Gothic) live apart from Spain, 

 four thousand of them, a root-grubbing race of homo sylvestris, 

 squatted in a land without written history or record, wdiere all 

 is traditional even to the holding of the soil. Not a title-deed 

 or other document exists ; yet this is a region of considerable 

 extent — say fifty miles by thirty. A recent pilgrimage to these 

 forgotten glens enables us to give, in another chapter, some 

 contemporary facts about " Las Hurdes." 



Throughout Spain the people of the " lower orders " — the 

 peasantry — strike those who leave the beaten tracks by their 

 independence and manly bearing. North or south, east or west, 

 an infinite variety of races differing in habit and character, even 

 in tongue, yet all agreeing in their solid manliness, in straight- 

 forward honesty, in what the Romans entitled virtus — fin e ty pes_- 

 save where contaminated by empleomania, call that " officialdom " 

 (one of the twin curses of Spain). Largely there exists here 

 ground- work for the rebuilding of Spanish greatness — such a land 



^ Catalonia was a separate State, uncU-r independent rulers, the Counts of Barcelona, 

 until A.D. 1131, when it was merged in the Kingdom of Arragon. 



