Barcelona, November 10, 1845.

Here I am, having reached the end of my long journey without encountering either brigands or impassable rivers, which is still more unusual. I was cordially received by the registrar, who had my work-table and my record books already arranged for me, and where I shall certainly lose the little eyesight that still remains to me. To reach his despacho, one has to pass through a Gothic room, built in the fourteenth century, and a marble court-yard, where there are orange trees as high as our roofs, all laden with ripe fruit. It is most poetic, as is also my apartment, which, in point of luxuries and comforts, reminds me of the caravansaries of Asia.

One is, however, more comfortable here than in Andalusia, but the natives are in all respects inferior to the Andalusians. They have, moreover, one crowning fault in my eyes, or, rather, in my ears; that is, that I can not understand one word of their jargon. While at Perpignan I saw two superb gipsies shearing some mules. I spoke to them in calÓ, to the great horror of the Colonel of Artillery who was with me; but he discovered that I was more familiar with it than they, and that they bore striking testimony to my knowledge, of which I was not a little proud.

To sum up the results gained from my journey, I feel that they were not worth the trouble of travelling so far to get, and that I might just as well have finished my story without coming to disturb the venerable dust on the archives of Aragon. This is an admission of honesty on my part, of which my biographer, I hope, will take account. On my journey, when I was not sleeping, that is to say, for nearly the whole route, I built thousands of air castles, which lack only your approval. Reply immediately, and write the address in very large and legible characters.