George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[241] recognized and saved it. The scabbard, however, being fastened to his side, fell into the hands of the enemy, and they had the meanness to keep it; so that, though the city was taken and he was liberated two days afterwards, it was never found again. This and a great many other similar stories he used to relate to me, with Scottish openheartedness, as we sat by his Moorish fountains or walked in the corridor of Charles V. after dinner; and these hours I shall remember as among the pleasantest I have passed in Spain.

My week in Seville—which was longer than I intended to remain there, though not so long as the city, its monuments and society, deserved-hastened rapidly away, and on the morning of the 15th of October I set off for Lisbon. The indirect but best route, which passes through Badajoz, is so dangerous from the number of robbers that now infest it, that, after taking the best advice I could get, I resolved to go directly across the mountains, under protection of one of the regular bodies of contrabandists that smuggle dollars from Seville to Lisbon, and in return smuggle back English goods from Lisbon to Seville.

For this purpose I sent to Zalamea, one of their little villages in the mountains, and two of them came openly to the city, and with two extra mules took me and my baggage and carried me to join their marauding party. We reached it about sundown the same evening, and found them all already bivouacked for the night, twenty-eight strong, with about forty mules. They were high-spirited, high-minded fellows, each armed with a gun, a pair of pistols, a sword and dirk, lying about in groups under some enormous cork-trees, or else preparing supper at a fire they had kindled. I easily accommodated myself to their manners, and spreading my blanket on the ground, ate as heartily and slept as soundly as the hardiest of them.

The next morning we felt quite acquainted, and, in the course of a journey of eight days through a country little frequented, and where, in fact, we avoided all human habitation, a curious sort of intimacy grew up between me and my kindly, faithful guides, which gave me a view of human nature on a side where I never thought to have seen it. Two of them were evidently men of much natural talent, and from them I gathered a pretty definite account of the principles and feelings of the fraternity and of their political and religious principles, which were strongly marked and well accommodated to their situation. This kind of conversation, indeed, was my chief amusement, for everything else on the journey was dreary and cheerless enough. Roads we sought none, but saw now and then a footpath or a sheeptrack,