The English cemetery, laid out upon a terraced hill-side just out of the city borders and overlooking the harbor, is a very interesting resort, admirably kept and appropriately ornamented with choice trees, shrubs, and flowers, tropically luxuriant from its southern exposure. In the squares, streets, and market places of Malaga, women sat each morning weaving fresh-cut flowers, fragrant clusters of rose-buds, mignonette, pansies, violets, and geraniums, pretty little clusters of which they sold for about one shilling, and found ready purchasers. One may be sure there is always a refined element in the locality, whether otherwise visible or not, where such an appreciation as this is manifested. The bull-fight may thrive; the populace may be, as they often are in Malaga, riotous and mischievous; education may be at a very low ebb, art almost entirely neglected; but where a love of nature, as evinced in the appreciation of beautiful flowers, is to be found, there is still extant on the popular heart the half-effaced image of its Maker.
The Spanish heart is by no means all bad. That the bull-fight fosters a spirit of cruelty among the masses no one can doubt, and that cruelty is a characteristic of the Catalan race is also only too well known. No other people would tolerate such cruelty; and that it is a disgrace to the nineteenth century every intelligent person outside of Spain will admit.
It is a very interesting fact, but seldom realized, that Spain in the time of Julius Cæsar contained nearly eighty millions of inhabitants, but to-day it has less than eighteen millions. In glancing at the map it will be perceived that Spain is a very large country, comprising nearly the whole of the southern peninsula of Europe (Portugal being confined to a small space), and extending north and south over six hundred miles. It is about double the size of Great Britain, and is rich in every known mineral, though she is poor enough in the necessary energy and enterprise requisite to improve her extraordinary possibilities. In many sections of the country great natural fertility is apparent, but nature has to perform the lion's share of the work. We were told by intelligent residents that many parts of Andalusia, for instance, could not be exceeded for rural beauty and fertility in any part of Europe, though we saw no satisfactory evidence of this; indeed, what we did see led to a contrary conclusion. In the environs of Malaga and the southern province generally, there are orange, lemon, and olive groves miles in extent; and the Moors had a poetical saying that this favored region was dropped from paradise, but there is more of poetry than truth in the legend. What is required is good cultivation and skilled agricultural enterprise. These would develop a different condition of affairs, and give to legitimate enterprise a rich reward. The sugar-cane, the grape-vine, the fig-tree, and the productive olive, mingling with the myrtle and the laurel, gratify the eye in and about the immediate district of Malaga; but as one advances inland, the products become natural or wild, cultivation primitive and only partial; grain fields are sparse, and one is often led to draw disparaging contrasts between this country and those of more ambitious and industrious agricultural nations.