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APPENDIX.
and lies nearly a quarter of a mile from the river, in a hollow among hills.
It contains a few hundred inhabitants, who subsist principally by
laboring in the fields and vineyards. is extinct.
Its race of merchants and mariners
There are no vessels belonging to the place, nor any show of
traffic, excepting at the season of fruit and wine, when a few mystics and other light barks anchor in the river to collect the produce of the neigh borhood.
T h e people are totally ignorant, and it is probable that the
greater part of them scarce know even the name of America.
Such is the
place whence sallied forth the enterprise for the discovery of the western world ! W e were now summoned to breakfast in a little saloon of the hacienda. T h e table was covered with natural luxuries produced upon the spot—fine purple and muscatel grapes from the adjacent vineyard, delicious melons from the garden, and generous wines made on the estate.
T h e repast
was heightened by the genial manners of my hospitable host, who appeared to possess the most enviable cheerfulness of spirit and simplicity of heart. After breakfast we set off in the calesa to visit the convent of La Rabida, about half a league distant.
T h e road, for a part of the way, lay
through the vineyards, and was deep and sandy.
T h e calasero had been
at his wit's end to conceive what motive a stranger like myself, apparently traveling for mere amusement, could have in coming so far to see so mis erable a place as Palos, which he set down as one of the very poorest places in the whole world ; but this additional toil and struggle through deep sand to visit the old convent of L a Rabida completed his confusion— " Hombre !" exclaimed he, " es una ruina ! no hay mas que dos frailes ! " — "Zounds ! why it's a ruin ! there are only two friars there !"
Don Juan
laughed, and told him that I had come all the way from Seville precisely to see that old ruin and those two friars.
T h e calasero made the Spaniard's
last reply when he is perplexed—he shrugged his shoulders and crossed himself.
After ascending a hill and passing through the skirts of a strag
gling pine wood, we arrived in front of the convent.
It stands in a bleak
and solitary situation, on the brow of a rocky height or promontory, over looking to the west a wide range of sea and land, bounded by the frontier mountains of Portugal, about eight leagues distant.
T h e convent is shut
out from a view of the vineyard of Palos by the gloomy forest of pines already mentioned, which cover the promontory to the east, and darken the whole landscape in that direction. There is nothing remarkable in the architecture of the convent ; part of it is Gothic, but the edifice, having been frequently repaired, and being