My fellow-traveller took this opportunity to pay a visit to some of his acquaintance at Osuna, a town of considerable wealth, with a numerous _noblesse_, a collegiate church, and a university. At the end of our first days’ journey we stopped at a pretty populous village called El Arahal. The inn, though far from comfortable, in the English sense of the word, was not one of the worst we were doomed to endure in our tour, for travellers were not here obliged to starve if they had not brought their own provisions; and we had a room with a few broken chairs, a deal table and two flock beds, laid upon planks raised from the brick-floor by iron tressels. A dish of ham and eggs afforded us an agreeable and substantial dinner, and a bottle of cheap, but by no means unpleasant wine, made us forget the jog-trot of our day’s journey.
We had just felt the approach of that peculiar kind of _ennui_ which lurks in every corner of an inn, when the sound of a fife and drum, with more of the sporting and mirthful than of the military character, awakened our curiosity. But to ask a question, even at the best Spanish _fonda_ (hotel), you must either exert your lungs, calling the waiter, chambermaid, and landlord, in succession, to multiply the chances of finding one disposed to hear you; or adopt the more quiet method of searching them through the house, beginning at the kitchen. Here, however, we had only to step out of our room and we found ourselves within the cook’s dominions. The best country inns, indeed, consist of a large hall contiguous to the street or road, and paved like the former with round stones. At one end of this hall there is a large hearth, raised about a foot from the ground. A wood-fire is constantly burning upon it, and travellers of all ranks and degrees, who do not prefer moping in their cold, unglazed rooms, are glad to take a seat near it, where they enjoy, gratis, the wit and humour of carriers, coachmen, and clowns, and a close view of the hostess or her maid, dressing successively in the same frying pan, now an omelet of eggs and onions, now a dish of dried fish with oil and love-apples, or it may be the limbs of a tough fowl which but a few moments before had been strutting about the house. The doors of the bed-rooms, as well as that of the stable-yard, all open into the hall. Leaving a sufficient space for carriages and horses to cross from the front door to the stables, the Spanish carriers, or _harrieros_, who travel in parties of twenty or thirty men and double that number of mules, range themselves at night along the walls, each upon his large packsaddle, with no other covering but a kind of horse-cloth, called _manta_, which they use on the road to keep them dry and warm in winter.