TRAVELLING IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL* THIS is something more than
an ordinary guide-book, although its author is careful to give the traveller practical hints, which in most cases will be found accurate. For it contains some excellent photographs and traces of personal observation which the guide-book as a rule studiously excludes. We have glimpses of washerwomen " singing a brief melody in the sunshine spreading garments on the hedges of aloes, while donkeys stand meekly waiting the homeward load," of "cork-choppers dressed in sleeveless brown jackets and trousers faced with sheepskin." The author is an enterprising American lady, who discovered by experience that "a tour of Iberia may no longer be regarded as an adventurous sally upon which the traveller is bound to encounter the romantic terrors of brigandage and the doubtful transport of mule and diligence." As for travelling in Portugal, she remarks : " Tourists may travel where they will in Portugal assured of quite unusual hospitality and absolute safety of purse and limb. The author is free to confess that, upon embarking for Portugal, she regarded as a precarious adventure a few days' stay in the Republican capital. But the brief visit planned drew on to protracted weeks; every highway and many by-paths were explored from the north to the south ; not a hint of disorder nor a ripple of dishonesty blemished her sojourn." For the traveller who writes the dangers are of a different kind—those of repeating what has been often written already, and of being led into mistakes through his slight knowledge of the country's language. Some of the Spanish and Portuguese words in this book have not escaped misprint. We may note, too, that Henry the Navigator was not born in 1460 ; that the date of El Greco's Entierro is 1586. not 1584; that it is a mistake to think that Basque is "not now in familiar use " ; oor, of course, is Cintra "the rock of Lisbon." That name was given by the English to the " Cabo da Roca," where the Serra de Cintra falls into the sea from a height of four hundred and seventy feet. The serra at its highest point is little over seventeen hundred feet, and only when seen from the sea, as Fielding saw it, could it be called, as in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, "a very high mountain." In the present book it is also called a mountain; and its fine abrupt rocks justify the word.
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