At each village will usually be found a _posada_. These differ in degree, mostly from bad downwards. The lowlier sort--little better than the _choza_--is but a long, low, one-storeyed barn which you share with fellow-wayfarers, and your own and their beasts, or any others that may come in, barely separated by a thatched partition that is neither noise-proof nor scent-proof. We can call instances to mind when even that small luxury was lacking, and all, human and other, shared alike. There are no windows--merely wooden hatches. If shut, both light and air are excluded; if open, hens, dogs, and cats will enter with the dawn--the former to finish what remains of supper. The cats will at least disperse the regiment of rats which, during the night, have scurried across your sleeping form.
Here we relate, as a specific example, a night we spent this last spring in northern Estremadura:--
Owing to a miscalculation of distance, it was an hour after sundown ere we reached our destination, a lonely hamlet among the hills. Our good little Galician ponies were dead-beat, for we had been in the saddle since 5 A.M., and it was past eight ere we toiled up that last steep, rock-terraced slope. We were a party of three, with a local guide and our own Sancho Panza--faithful companion, friend, and servant of many years' standing. At a dilapidated hovel, the last in the village and perched on a crag, we drew rein, and after repeated knocks the door was opened by a girl--she had set down a five-year-old child among the donkeys while she drew the bolt, the ground-floor being (as usual) a stable. To our inquiry as to food--and the hunger of the lost was upon us--our hostess merely shrugged her shoulders, and with an expressive gesture of open hands, answered "Nada"--nothing! Sancho, however, was equal to the occasion. Within two minutes, while we yet stood disconsolate, he returned with a cackling cockerel in his arms. "Stew him quick before he crows," he adjured the girl, and turned to unload the ponies.
What an age a cockerel takes to cook! It was midnight ere he smoked on the board and, hunger satisfied, we could turn in. In an upper den were two alcoves with beds, or rather stone ledges, ordinarily used by the family, and which were assigned to us, the luckless No. 3 by lot having to make shift (in preference to sleeping on a filthy floor) with three cranky tables of varying heights, and whose united lengths proved a foot too short at either end!