The air is balmy, the scene lovely, and all nature smiling with the sweet promises of Spring. Is this the goddess Flora leading down a joyous train to the fields below? It is only Lady Mabel cantering somewhat recklessly down hill. When she reached the more level ground, she so far out-rode the ladies of her party, who were mounted on mules, that, tired of loitering for them to come up, she proposed to L'Isle, who had kept by her side, to employ their leisure in ascending the bare hill on their left, to examine the old tower, that stood solitary and conspicuous on its top. From the clearness of the atmosphere it seemed nearer than it was, and the broken ground compelled them to make a circuit before they reached it. Hence they looked down upon their friends, crawling at a snail's pace along the road to Badajoz. They rode round the weather-beaten, ruinous tower. It was square, with only one small entrance, many feet above the ground, and leading into a small room amidst the thick walls.
"What could this have been built for?" Lady Mabel asked.
"It is one of those watch-towers called atalaias," answered L'Isle. "Many of them are scattered along the heights on the border. They are memorials of an age in which one of people's chief occupations was watching against the approach of their neighbors."
"Stirring times, those," said Lady Mabel. "People could not then complain that their vigilance was lulled to sleep by too great security; but this is, perhaps, a more comfortable age."
"To us in our island home," said L'Isle. "The improvement is more doubtful here. There was a time when your forefathers and mine thus kept watch against each other; when our own border hills were crowned with similar watch-towers; but never did any country continue so long a debatable land, and need, for so many centuries, the watch-tower and the signal fire on its hills, as this peninsula during the slow process of its redemption from the crescent to the cross."
"From this point," said Lady Mabel, "Elvas and Badajoz look like two giant champions facing each other, in arms, each, for the defence of his own border, yet one does not see here any of those great natural barriers that should divide nations."
"They are wanting, not only here," said L'Isle, "but on other parts of the frontier. The great rivers, the Duoro, the Tagus and the Guadiana, and the mountain chains separating their valleys, instead of dividing the two kingdoms, run into Portugal from Spain. The division of these countries is not natural, but accidental; and in spite of some points of contrast, the Portuguese are almost as much like the Spaniards, as these last are like each other—for Spain is in truth a variety of countries, the Spaniards a variety of nations."
"At length, however," said she, "Spain and Portugal are united in one cause."
"Yet the Portuguese still hates the Spaniards," said L'Isle, "and the Spaniard contemns the Portuguese."
"And we despise both," said Lady Mabel.