I had intended to proceed to Cadiz from Seville after I had taken a peep at Puerto, but that little American gentleman whom I met at Córdoba was with me, and persuaded me to stop by the story of a wonderful castle prison, a sort of _Tour de Nesle_, which was to be seen in the vicinity, where the _bonne amie_ of a King of Spain had been built up in the good old times when monarchs raised favourites from the gutter one day, and sometimes ordered their weazands to be slit the next. This show-place is about a league from Puerto, in the valley of Sidonia, and is called El Castillo de Doña Blanca. We took a calesa to go there. My companion objected to travelling on horseback; he could not stomach the peculiar Moorish saddle with its high-peaked cantle and crupper, and its catch-and-carry stirrups. We took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern of those employed to beautify genteel coffins, remove the cushions, and replace them with a wisp of straw, smash the springs, and put swing-leathers underneath instead, cover the whole article with a coating of liquid mud, leave it to dry in a mouldy place where the rats shall have free access to the leather for gnawing practice, return in seven years, and you will find a tolerably correct imitation of that decayed machine, the Andalusian calesa. It is more picturesque than the Neapolitan _corricolo_; it is all ribs and bones, and is much given to inward groaning as it jerks and jolts along. Such a trap we took; the driver lazily clambered on the shafts, and away hobbled our lean steed.
The road to Lady Blanche's Castle is like that to Jordan in the nigger songs; it is "a hard road to travel"--a road full of holes and quagmires and jutting rocks; and yet the driver told me it had once been a good road, but that was in the reign of Queen Isabella. Everything seems to have been allowed to go to dilapidation since. On the outskirts of Puerto we passed an English cemetery; I am glad to say it is almost uninhabited. If there is an English dead settlement there ought to be a live one, I reasoned, unless those who are buried here date from Peninsular battles. The first part of the road to Blanche's Castle is level, and bordered with thick growths of prickly pear; there is a view of the sea, and of the Guadalate, spanned by a metal bridge--a Menai on a small scale. Farther on, as we get to a district called La Piedad, the country is diversified by swampy flats at one side and sandy hills at the other. Blanche's Castle was a commonplace ruin, a complete "sell," and we turned our horse's head rather savagely. As we were coming back, the little American shortening the way by Sandford and Merton observations of this nature--"Prickly pear makes a capital hedge; no cattle will face it; the spikes of the plant are as tenacious as fish-hooks. The fibres of the aloe are unusually strong; they make better cordage than hemp, but will not bear the wet so well"--a sight caught my eyes which caused me to stare. A tall young fellow, with his trousers tucked up, was wading knee-deep in the bottoms beside the road. He wore a suit of Oxford mixture.