316 Unexplored Spain 
Norway. Here, both to-day and yesterday, we observed ring- 
ouzels, doubtless nesting amid the dense covert. 
We soon picked up our friends of yesterday—small hedge- 
sparrow-like birds with blue-grey throat, striated back, and red 
patches on either flank, the alpine accentor. At first they were 
fairly tame, allowing us to watch and sketch them perched on 
lowly shrub or rock, warbling a sweet little carol (louder, but 
otherwise resembling that of our hedge-sparrow), or darting to 
pick up a straying ant. After a while that confidence, though 
wholly unabused, vanished; they became wild and cautious, 
refusing to allow us a single specimen! These birds were 
evidently paired, but showed no signs of nesting. Alas, that a 
drawing by Commander Lynes depicting the scene with the 
Picacho de la Veleta in the background refuses to “ reproduce” ! 
These were the only accentors we saw, nor did we see to-day 
or any other day a single snow-finch. 
An Alpine Farm.—The lands of San Gerénimo (where we 
were quartered) extend up the Monachil to either watershed 
—a length of 44 leagues, while the breadth cannot average less 
than two. The acreage we leave to be calculated by those who 
care for such detail. At this date (early May) certainly one- 
half lay under snow, which still encumbered the higher patches 
of cultivation—to-day we saw men unearthing last autumn’s 
crop of potatoes well above the snow-line. At lower levels some 
corn already stood six inches high, but many “fields” were 
necessarily, as yet, unploughed. Fields, by the way, were 
separated not, as at home, by hedges, but sometimes by a sheer 
drop of 500 or 1000 feet, elsewhere by perpendicular rock-faces 
or by shale-shoots. But the laborious cultivation missed not one 
level patch—nor unlevel either, since we saw ox-teams ploughing 
where one wondered if even a cat could maintain a footing. 
This is the highest farm in Nevdda, possibly in all Spain. 
The house stands at 6000 feet and the lands extend to the Veleta, 
11,597 feet. It provides grazing for goats and sheep, as well as a 
small herd of cattle, and thus affords permanent employment to 
several herdsmen. But at seed-time and harvest it employs 
as many as twenty or thirty men who, with their dependents, live 
in rude esparto-thatched huts scattered over the whole fifteen 
miles, and it was the numbers of these (assembled for pay-day) 
