Introductory 5 
to drive your horses or ponies: and such offices he 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 fweros, 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 Leén; 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-away 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, where 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 virtws—tfine types 
save where contaminated by empléomania, 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 
1 Catalonia was a separate State, under independent rulers, the Counts of Barcelona, 
until A.D. 1131, when it was merged in the Kingdom of Arragon. 
