We rode a pretty ride from Campillo this morning through Benalua, which you may inform the Duchess of San Lorenzo is in a high state of preservation; a sort of town on the side of a hill, which looks as if giants had been pelting each other with pigsties.
At Valdepeñas we fell in with three ’pon-honourish, well-fleshed English, journeying on to the Corte, a trio, which will relieve you when you have had enough of duets, the order of travelling in Spain since the unnatural alliance of those modern Pyladeses and Oresteses, St. Barbe and Custine, Eden[25] and Martin, Meara and Heaphy, all hunting in couples, to say nothing of a more proper marital couple, who have lately drawn so largely on your good-nature and hospitality.
I have not had time to throw myself at the feet of Dionysia, being fully occupied with the joys of paternity, having a small boarding-school now romping about, to the utter discomfiture of any intelligible writing or spelling.
Pray let us hear of that horrid cholera, whether the last news in Galignani is confirmed. The smallest donations in that way thankfully received.
Excuse this scrawl, which is just to notify to you that we have escaped José Maria and Botiga, and are always your secure servants. What a sheet of paper to write, as Don Carlos says, “to such a great man as we never had in Jaen.” You will become a Carlista.
CHAPTER III
SEVILLE REVISITED
DECEMBER 1831-DECEMBER 1832
Return to Seville—Execution of Torrijos—Question of Spanish Intervention in the Affairs of Portugal—Tarifa—Salamanca and North-Western Spain—Succession to the Spanish Crown.
In December the Fords returned from the Alhambra to a house which they had taken in the Calle de los Monsalvos at Seville. There they spent the winter of 1831-2. A letter dated December 10th, 1831, announces their return, and their life resumed its previous course.
We have at length arrived here safely, God be praised! through the deepest ploughed fields, worst Ventas, and stoutest gangs of robbers in all Spain. We have been six mortal days on the journey, doing some 36 leagues at an expense of 6000 or 7000 reals, having to feed 29 persons every night, ravenous wolves who never ate before and probably never will again, unless some Milor or Embajador should make that journey. José Maria was muy politico, and neither the chink of my dollars nor the black eye and red lip of Sarah could tempt him to come down from a hill, where we saw him and his drawn up in a line about a mile off, as we passed through his country—his it is in every sense of the word.