"It is true," answered my friend, "but what will you say when you have seen the Court of the Lions? Come, let us hurry."

We left the tower with hasty steps, crossed the Court of Myrtles, and came to a little door opposite the door of entrance.

"Stop!" cried Gongora.

I stopped.

"Do me a favor?"

"A hundred."

"Only one: shut your eyes and don't open them until I tell you."

"Well, they are shut."

"See that you keep them so; I sha'n't like it if you open them."

"Never fear."

Gongora took me by the hand and led me forward: I trembled like a leaf.

We took about fifteen steps and stopped.

"Look!" said Gongora in an agitated voice.

I looked, and I swear by the head of my reader I felt two tears trickling down my cheeks.

We were in the Court of the Lions.

If at that moment I had been obliged to go out as I had come in, I could not have told what I had seen. A forest of columns, a vision of arches and tracery, an indefinable elegance, an unimaginable delicacy, prodigious wealth; an irrepressible sense of airiness, transparency, and wavy motion like a great pavilion of lace; an appearance as of an edifice which must dissolve at a breath; a variety of lights and mysterious shadows; a confusion, a capricious disorder, of little things; the grandeur of a castle, the gayety of a summer-house; an harmonious grace, an extravagance, a delight; the fancy of an enamored girl, the dream of an angel; a madness, a nameless something,—such is the first effect of the Court of the Lions.

The court is not larger than a great ball-room; it is rectangular in form, with walls no higher than a two-storied Andalusian cottage. A light portico runs all around, supported by very slender white marble columns grouped in symmetrical disorder, two by two and three by three, almost without pedestals, so that they are like the trunks of trees standing on the ground: they have varied capitals, high and graceful, in the form of little pilasters, above which bend little arches of very graceful form, which do not seem to rest upon the columns, but rather to be suspended over them like curtains upholding the columns themselves and resembling ribbons and twining garlands. From the middle of the two shortest sides advance two groups of columns forming two little square temples of nine arches in the form of stalactites, fringes, pendants, and tassels that seem as though they ought to swing and become tangled with the slightest breeze. Large Arabian inscriptions run along the four walls, over the arches, around the capitals, and along the walls of the little temple. In the middle of the court rises a great marble basin supported by twelve lions and surrounded by a paved channel, from which flow four other smaller channels that make a cross between the four sides of the court, cross the portico, enter the adjoining rooms, and join the other water-courses which surround the entire edifice. Behind the two two little temples and in the middle of the other two sides there appear halls and suites of rooms with great open doors, through which one can see the dark background broken by the white columns, gleaming as if they stood at the mouth of a grotto. At every step the forest of columns seems to move and rearrange itself in a new way; behind a column that is apparently single spring up two, three, a row of columns; some fade away, others unite, and still others separate: on looking back from the end of one of the halls everything appears different; the arches on the opposite side seem very far away; the columns appear out of place; the little temples have changed their form; one sees new arches rising beyond the walls, and new columns gleaming here in the sunlight, there in the shadow, yonder scarcely visible by the dim light which sifts through the tracery of the stucco, and the farthest lost in the darkness. There is a constant variety of scene, distance, deceptive effects, mysteries, and playful tricks of the eye, produced by the architecture, the sun, and one's heightened imagination.

"What must this patio have been," said Gongora, "when the inner walls of the portico were resplendent with mosaics, the capitals of the columns flashed with gold, the ceilings and vaults were painted in a thousand colors, the doors hung with silken curtains, the niches full of flowers, and under the little temples and through the halls ran streams of perfumed water, and from the nostrils of the lions spurted twelve jets which fell into the basin, and the air was heavy with the most delicious perfumes of Arabia!"

We remained in the court over an hour, and the time passed like a flash; and I too did what all have done in that place—Spaniards and foreigners alike, men and women, poets and those who are not poets. I ran my hand along the walls, touched all the little columns, clasped them one by one with my two hands like the waist of a child, hid among them, counted them, looked at them from a hundred directions, crossed the court in a hundred ways; tried if it were true that by speaking a word in a deep voice in the mouth of one of the lions you could hear it distinctly from the mouths of all the others; searched along the marbles for the blood-spots of the romantic legends, and wearied my eyes and brain in following the arabesques. There were a number of ladies present. In the Court of the Lions ladies show every sort of childish delight: they look out between two twin columns, hide in the dark corners, sit on the floor, and stand for hours motionless, resting their heads upon their hands, dreaming. These ladies did likewise. There was one dressed in white who, as she passed behind the distant columns, when she thought no one saw her assumed a certain majestic air, like a melancholy sultana, and then laughed with one of her friends: it was enchanting.

"Let us go," said my friend.

"Let us go," I replied, and could not move a step. I was experiencing not only a delightful sense of surprise, but I was trembling with pleasure, and was filled with a longing to touch, to probe, and in some way to see behind those walls and those columns, as if they were made of some secret material and ought to disclose in their inmost part the first cause of the fascination which the place exerts. In all my life I have never thought or said, or shall ever say, so many fond words, so many foolish expressions, so many pretty, happy, senseless things, as I thought and said at that hour.

"But one must come here at sunrise," said Gongora, "one must come at sunset, or at night when the moon is full, to see the miracles of color, light, and shade. It is enough to make one lose one's head."

We went to see the halls. On the eastern side is the Hall of Justice, which is reached by passing under three great arches, each of which corresponds with a door opening into the court. It is a long, narrow hall, with intricate arabesques and precious mosaics, and its vaulted ceiling all points and hollows and clusters of stucco that hang down from the arches and run along the walls, clustered together here and there, drooping, growing one out of the other, crowding and overtopping each other, so that they seem to dispute the space like the bubbles in boiling water, and still presenting in many parts traces of old colors that must have given the ceiling the appearance of a pavilion covered with flowers and hanging fruit. The hall has three little alcoves, in each of which one may see a Moorish painting, to which time and the extreme rarity of works remaining from the brush of Moorish artists have given a very high value. The paintings are on leather, and the leather is fastened to the wall. In the central alcove there are painted on a golden ground ten men, supposed to be ten kings of Granada, clothed in white, with cowls on their heads and scimitars in their hands, sitting on embroidered cushions. The paintings in the other two alcoves represent castles, ladies and cavaliers, hunting scenes, and love episodes whose significance it is difficult to understand. But the faces of the ten kings are marvellously true to the picture one has formed of their race: there is the dark olive complexion, the sensuous lips, the black eyes, with an intense mysterious glance that seems always to be shining in the dark corners of the halls of the Alhambra.

On the north side of the court there is another hall, called the hall De las dos Hermanas (of the two sisters), so called from two great marble slabs which form the pavement. It is the most beautiful hall in the Alhambra—a little square arched room, with one of those ceilings in the form of a cupola which the Spaniards call half oranges, supported by slender columns and arches arranged in a circle, all adorned, like a grotto full of stalactites, with an infinite number of points and hollows, colored and gilded, and so light to the view that it seems as if they are suspended in the air, and would tremble at a touch like a curtain or separate like a cloud or disappear like a cluster of soap-bubbles. The walls, like those of all the other halls, are bedecked with stucco and carved with arabesques incredibly intricate and delicate, forming one of the most marvellous works of human patience and imagination. The more one looks, the more numberless become the lines which blend and cross, and from one figure springs another, and from that a third, and all three produce a fourth that has escaped the eye, and this divides suddenly into ten other figures that have passed unnoticed, and then they mingle again and are again transformed; and one never ceases to discover new combinations, for when the first reappear they are already forgotten, and produce the same effect as at the beginning. One would lose sight and reason in trying to comprehend that labyrinth: it would require an hour to study the outlines of a window, the ornaments of a pilaster, and the arabesques of a frieze; an hour would not be sufficient to fix upon the mind the design of one of the stupendous cedar doors. On either side of the hall there are two little alcoves, and in the centre a little basin with a pipe for a fountain that empties into the channel that crosses the portico and flows to the Fountain of the Lions.

Directly opposite the entrance there is another door, through which one passes into another long, narrow room called the Hall of the Oranges. And from this hall, through a third door, one enters a little chamber called the Cabinet of Lindaraja, very richly ornamented, at the end of which there is a graceful window with two arches overlooking a garden.

To enjoy all the beauty of this magical architecture one must leave the Hall of the Two Sisters, cross the Court of the Lions, and enter a room called the Hall of the Abencerrages, which lies on the southern side, opposite the Hall of the Two Sisters, to which it is very similar in form and ornamentation. From the end of this hall one looks across the Court of the Lions through the Hall of the Two Sisters into the Hall of the Oranges and even into the Cabinet of Lindaraja and the garden beyond, where a mass of verdure appears under the arches of that jewel of a window. The two sides of this window, so diminutive and full of light when seen in the distance from the end of that suite of darkened rooms, look like two great open eyes, that look at you and make you imagine that beyond them must lie the unfathomable mysteries of paradise.

After seeing the Hall of the Abencerrages we went to see the baths, which are situated between the Hall of the Two Sisters and the Court of the Myrtles. We descended a flight of stairs, passed a long narrow corridor, and came out into a splendid hall called the hall De las Divans, where the favorites of the king came to rest on their Persian rugs to the sound of the lyre after they had bathed in the adjoining rooms. This hall was reconstructed on the plans of the ancient ruins, and adorned with arabesques, gilded and painted, by Spanish artists after the ancient patterns; consequently one may consider it a room of the Moorish period remaining intact in every part. In the middle is a fountain, and in the opposite walls are two alcoves where the women reposed on divans, and overhead the galleries where the musicians played. The walls are laced, dotted, checkered, and mottled with a thousand brilliant hues, presenting the appearance of a tapestry of Chinese stuff shot with golden threads, with an endless interweaving of figures that must have maddened the most patient mosaic-worker on earth.

Nevertheless, a painter was at work in the hall. He was a German who had worked for three months in copying the walls. Gongora knew him, and asked, "It is wearisome work, is it not?"

And he answered with a smile, "I don't find it so," and bent again over his picture.

I looked at him as if he had been a creature from another world.

We entered the little bathing-chambers, vaulted and lighted from above by some star-and flower-shaped apertures in the wall. The bathing-tubs are very large, single blocks of marble enclosed between two walls. The corridors which lead from one room to the other are low and narrow, so that a man can scarcely pass through them; they are delightfully cool. As I stood looking into one of these little rooms I was suddenly impressed with a sad thought.

"What makes you sad?" asked my friend.

"I was thinking," I replied, "of how we live, summer and winter, in houses like barracks, in rooms on the third floor, which are either dark or else flooded with a torrent of light, without marble, without water, without flowers, without columns; I was thinking that we must live so all our lives and die between those walls without once experiencing the delights of these charmed palaces; I was thinking that even in this wretched earthly life one may enjoy vastly, and that I shall not share this enjoyment at all; I was thinking that I might have been born four centuries ago a king of Granada, and that I was born instead a poor man."

My friend laughed, and, taking my arm between his thumb and finger, as if to give me a pinch, he said, "Don't think of that. Think of how much beauty, grace, and mystery these tubs must have seen; of the little feet that have played in their perfumed waters; of the long hair which has fallen over their rims; of the great languid eyes that have looked at the sky through the openings in the vaulted ceiling, while beneath the arches of the Court of the Lions sounded the hastening step of an impatient caliph, and the hundred fountains of the castle sighed with a quickening murmur, 'Come! come! come!' and in a perfumed hall a trembling slave reverently closed the windows with the rose-colored curtains."

"Ah! leave my soul in peace!" I replied, shrugging my shoulders.

We crossed the garden of the Cabinet of Lindaraja and a mysterious court called the Patio de la Reja, and by a long gallery that commands a view of the country reached the top of one of the farthest towers of the Alhambra, called the Mirador de la Reina (the Queen's toilet), shaded by a little pavilion and open all round, hanging over an abyss like an eagle's nest. The view one enjoys from this point—one may say it without fear of contradiction—has not its equal on the face of the earth.

Beyond the Generalife, on the summit of a higher mountain, now bleak and bare, there rose in Moorish times other royal palaces, with gardens connected with each other by great avenues lined with myrtle hedges. Now all these marvels of architecture encircled by groves, fountains, and flowers, those fabulous castles in the air, those magnificent and fragrant nests of love and delight, have disappeared, and scarcely a heap of rubbish or a short stretch of wall remains to tell their story to the passer-by. But these ruins, that elsewhere would arouse a feeling of melancholy, do not have such an influence in the presence of that glorious nature whose enchantment not even the most marvellous works of man have ever been able to equal.

On re-entering the city I stopped at one end of the Carrera del Darro, in front of a house richly adorned with bas-reliefs representing heraldic shields, armor, cherubs, and lions, with a little balcony, over one corner of which, partly on one wall and partly on another, I read the following mysterious inscription stamped in great letters:

"Esperando la del Cielo,"

which, literally translated, signifies "Awaiting her in Heaven." Curious to learn the hidden meaning of those words, I made a note of them, so that I might ask the learned father of my friend about them. He gave me two interpretations, the one almost certainly correct, but not at all romantic; the other romantic, but very doubtful. I give the last: The house belonged to Don Fernando de Zafra, the secretary of the Catholic kings. He had a very beautiful daughter. A young hidalgo, of a family hostile or inferior in rank to the house of Zafra, became enamored of the daughter, and, as his love was returned, he asked for her hand in marriage, but was refused. The refusal of her father stirred the love of the two young hearts to flame: the windows of the house were low; the lover one night succeeded in making the ascent and entered the maiden's room. Whether he upset a chair on entering, or coughed, or uttered a low cry of joy on seeing his beautiful love welcoming him with open arms, the tradition does not tell, and no one knows; but certain it is that Don Fernando de Zafra heard a noise, ran in, saw, and, blind with fury, rushed upon the ill-fated young man to put him to death. But he succeeded in making his escape, and Don Fernando in following him ran into one of his own pages, a partisan of the lovers, who had helped the hidalgo to enter the house: in his haste his master mistook him for the betrayer, and, without hearing his protests and prayers, he had him bound and hanged from the balcony. The tradition runs that while the poor victim kept crying, "Pity! pity!" the outraged father responded as he pointed toward the balcony, "Thou shalt stay there esperando la del Cielo!" (awaiting her in heaven)—a reply which he afterward had cut in the stone walls as a perpetual warning to evil-doers.

I devoted the rest of the day to the churches and monasteries.

The cathedral of Granada deserves to be described part by part in an even higher degree than the cathedral of Malaga, although it too is beautiful and magnificent; but I have already described enough churches. Its foundation was laid by the Catholic kings in 1529 upon the ruins of the principal mosque of the city, but it has never been finished. It has a great faÇade with three doorways, adorned with statues and bas-reliefs, and it consists of five naves, divided by twenty measureless pilasters, each composed of a bundle of slender columns. The chapels contain paintings by Boccanegra, sculptures by Torrigiano, and tombs and other precious ornaments. Admirable above all is the great chapel, supported by twenty Corinthian columns divided into two orders, upon the first of which rise colossal statues of the twelve apostles, and on the second an entablature covered with garlands and heads of cherubs. Overhead runs a circle of magnificent stained-glass windows, which represent the Passion, and from the frieze which crowns them leap ten bold arches forming the vault of the chapel. Within the arches that support the columns are six great paintings by Alonzo Cano, which are said to be his most beautiful and finished work.

And since I have spoken of Alonzo Cano, a native of Granada, one of the strongest Spanish painters of the seventeenth century, although a disciple of the Sevillian school rather than the founder, as some assert, of a school of his own, but less original than his greatest contemporaries,—since I have spoken of him, I wish here to record some traits of his genius and anecdotes of his life little known outside of Spain, although exceedingly remarkable. Alonzo Cano was the most quarrelsome, the most irascible, and the most violent of the Spanish painters. He spent his life in contention. He was a priest. From 1652 to 1658, for six consecutive years, without a day's intermission, he wrangled with the canons of the cathedral of Granada, of which he was steward, because he was not willing to become subdeacon in accordance with the stipulated agreement; before leaving Granada he broke into pieces with his own hands a statue of Saint Anthony of Padua which he had made to the order of an auditor of the chancery, because the man allowed himself to observe that the price demanded seemed a little dear. Chosen master of design to the royal prince, who, as it appears, was not born with a talent for painting, he so exasperated his pupil that the boy was obliged to have recourse to the king that he might be taken out of his hands. Remanded to Granada, to the neighborhood of the chapter of the cathedral, as an especial favor, he bore such a deep rancor from his old litigations with his canons that throughout his life he would not do a stroke of work for them. But this is a small matter. He nursed a blind, bestial, inextinguishable hatred against the Hebrews, and was firmly convinced that in any way to touch a Hebrew or any object that a Hebrew had touched would bring him misfortune. Owing to this conviction he did some of the most extravagant feats in the world. If in walking along the street he ran against a Jew, he would strip off the infected garment and return home in his shirt-sleeves. If by chance he succeeded in discovering that in his absence a servant had admitted a Jew into the house, he discharged the servant, threw away the shoes with which he had touched the pavement profaned by the circumcised, and sometimes even had the pavement torn up and reset. And he found something to find fault with even as he was dying. When he was approaching the end of life the confessor handed him a clumsily-made crucifix that he might kiss it, but he pushed it away with his hand, saying, "Father, give me a naked cross, that I may worship Jesus Christ as He Himself is and as I behold Him in my mind." But, after all, his was a rare, charitable nature which abhorred every vulgar action, and loved with a deep and very pure love the art in which he remains immortal.

On returning to the church after I had made the round of all the chapels and was preparing to leave, I was impressed by a suspicion that there was something else still to be seen. I had not read the Guidebook and had been told nothing, but I heard an inner voice which said to me, "Seek!" and, in fact, I sought with my eyes in every direction, without knowing what I sought. A cicerone noticed me and sidled up to me, as all of his kind do, like an assassin, and asked me with an air of mystery, "Quiere usted algo?" (Do you wish something, sir?)

"I should like to know," I replied, "if there is anything to see in this cathedral besides that which I have seen already?"

"How!" exclaimed the cicerone; "you have not seen the royal chapel, have you, sir?"

"What is there in the royal chapel?"

"What is there? Caramba! Nothing less than the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholics."

I could have said so! I had in my mind a place ready for this idea, and the idea was lacking! The Catholic kings must certainly have been buried in Granada, where they fought the last great chivalrous war of the Middle Ages, and where they gave Christopher Columbus a commission to fit out ships which bore him to the New World. I ran rather than walked to the royal chapel, preceded by the limping cicerone; an old sacristan opened the door of the sacristy, and before he allowed me to enter and see the tombs he led me to a sort of glass cupboard full of precious objects, and said to me, "You will remember that Isabella the Catholic, to furnish Christopher Columbus with the money that he needed to supply the ships for the voyage, not knowing where to turn because the coffers of the state were empty, put her jewels in pawn."

"Yes: well?" I demanded impatiently; and, divining the answer, felt my heart beat faster the while.

"Well," replied the sacristan, "that is the box in which the queen locked her jewels to send them to be pawned."

And so saying he opened the cupboard and took out the box and handed it to me.

Oh! brave men may say what they will; as for me, there are things that make me tremble and weep. I have touched the box that contained the treasure by which Columbus was enabled to discover America. Every time I repeat those words my blood is stirred, and I add, "I have touched it with these hands," and I look at my hands.

That cupboard contains also the sword of King Ferdinand, the crown and sceptre of Isabella, a missal and some other ornaments of the king and queen.

We entered the chapel. Between the altar and a great iron chancel that separates it from the remaining space stand two great mausoleums of marble adorned with statuettes and bas-reliefs of great value. Upon one of them lie the statues of Ferdinand and Isabella in their royal robes, with crown, sword, and sceptre; on the other the statues of the other two princes of Spain, and around the statues lions, angels, and arms, and various ornaments, presenting a regal appearance, austere and magnificent.

The sacristan lighted a flambeau, and, pointing out a sort of trap-door in the pavement between the two mausoleums, asked me to open it and descend into the subterranean chamber. With the cicerone's aid I opened the trap-door; the sacristan descended, and I followed him down a narrow little staircase until we reached a little room. There were five caskets of lead, bound with iron bands, each sealed with two initials under a crown. The sacristan lowered the torch, and, touching all five of them, one after another, with his hand, said in a slow, solemn voice,

"Here rests the great queen Isabella the Catholic.

"Here rests the great king Ferdinand V.

"Here rests the king Philip I.

"Here rests Queen Joanna the Mad.

"Here rests Lady Maria, her daughter, who died at the age of nine years.

"God keep them all in his holy peace!"

And, placing the torch on the ground, he crossed his arms and closed his eyes, as if to give me time for meditation.

One would become a hunchback at his desk if he were to describe all the religious monuments of Granada—the stupendous Cartuja; the Monte Sacro, containing the grottoes of the martyrs; the church of San Geronimo, where the great leader Gonzalez di Cordova is buried; the convent of Santo Domingo, founded by Torquemada the Inquisitor; the convent of the Angels, containing paintings by Cano and Murillo and many others; but I suppose that my readers may be even more weary than I am, and will consequently pardon me for passing by a mountain of description which probably would only give them a confused idea of the things described.

But as I have mentioned the sepulchre of the great commander, Gonzalez di Cordova, I cannot forbear translating a curious document in reference to him which was shown me in the church of San Geronimo by a sacristan who was an admirer of the deeds of that hero. The document, in the form of an anecdote, is as follows:

"Every step of the great captain Don Gonzalez di Cordova was an assault, and every assault a victory; his sepulchre in the convent of the Geronomites at Granada was adorned with two hundred banners which he had taken. His envious rivals, and the treasurers of the kingdom of Naples in particular, induced the king in 1506 to demand a statement from Gonzalez of the use he had made of the great sums received from Spain for the conduct of the war in Italy; and, in fact, the king was so small as to consent, and even to be present on the occasion of the conference.

"Gonzalez acceded to the demand with the haughtiest disdain, and proposed to give a severe lesson to the treasurers and the king upon the treatment and consideration to be accorded a conqueror of kingdoms.

"He replied with great indifference and calmness that he would prepare his accounts for the following day, and would let it appear which was the debtor, himself or the exchequer, which demanded an account of one hundred and thirty thousand ducats delivered upon the first payment, eighty thousand crowns upon the second, three millions upon the third, eleven millions upon the fourth, thirteen millions upon the fifth, and so on as the solemn, nasal, foolish secretary who authorized so important an act continued to enumerate the sums.

"The great Gonzalez kept his word, presented himself at the second audience, and, bringing out a voluminous book in which he had noted his justification, he began with the following words in a deep, sonorous voice:

"'Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats and nine reales to the fathers, the nuns, and the poor, to the end that they might pray God for the triumph of the Spanish arms.

"'One hundred thousand ducats for powder and shot.

"'Ten thousand ducats for perfumed gloves to protect the soldiers from the stench of the corpses of the enemy left on the field of battle.

"'One hundred and seventy thousand ducats for renewing bells worn out by continuous ringing for constant new victories over the enemy.

"'Fifty thousand ducats for brandy for the soldiers on the day of battle.

"'A million and a half ducats for the maintenance of the prisoners and wounded.

"'A million for returning thanks and Te Deums to the Omnipotent.

"'Three hundred millions in masses for the dead.

"'Seven hundred thousand four hundred and ninety-four ducats for spies and ...

"'One hundred millions for the patience which I showed yesterday on hearing that the king demanded an account from the man who has given him his kingdom.'

"These are the celebrated accounts of the great captain, the originals of which are in the possession of Count d'Altimira.

"One of the original accounts, with the autograph seal of the great captain, exists in the Military Museum of London, where it is guarded with great care."

On reading this document I returned to the hotel, making invidious comparisons between Gonzalez di Cordova and the Spanish generals of our times, which, for grave state reasons, as they say in the tragedies, I dare not repeat.

In the hotel I saw something new every day. There were many university students who had come from Malaga and other Andalusian cities to take the examination for the doctor's degree at Granada, whether because they were a little easier there or for what other reason I do not know. We all ate at a round table. One morning at breakfast one of the students, a young man of about twenty, announced that at two o'clock he was to be examined in canon law, and that, not feeling very sure of himself, he had decided to take a glass of wine to refresh the springs of eloquence. He was accustomed to drink only wine weakened with water, and committed the imprudence of emptying at a single draught a glass of the vintage of Xerez. His face changed in an instant in so strange a manner that if I had not seen the transformation with my own eyes I should not have believed that he was the same person.

"There! that is enough!" cried his friends.

But the young man, who already felt that he had become suddenly strong, keen, and confident, cast a compassionate glance at his companions, and with a lordly gesture ordered the waiter to fetch him another glass.

"You will be drunk," they said.

His only response was to drain a second glass.

Then he became wonderfully talkative. There was a score of persons at table: in a few minutes he was conversing with them all, and he revealed a thousand secrets of his past life and his plans for the future. He said that he was from Cadiz, that he had eight thousand francs a year to spend, and that he wished to devote himself to a diplomatic career, because with that revenue, added to something which his uncle would leave him, he should be able to cut a good figure wherever he might be; that he had decided to take a wife at thirty, and to marry a woman as tall as himself, because it was his opinion that the wife should be of the same stature as her husband, to keep either from getting the upper hand of the other; that when he was a boy he was in love with the daughter of an American consul as beautiful as a flower and strong as a pine, but she had a red birth-mark behind one ear, which looked badly, although she knew how to cover it very well with her scarf, and he showed us with his napkin how she covered it; and that Don Amadeus was too ingenuous a man to succeed in governing Spain; that of the poets Zorilla and Espronceda, he had always preferred Espronceda; that it would be folly to cede Cuba to America; that the examination on canon law made him laugh; and that he wished to drink another four fingers of Xerez, the finest wine in Europe.

He drank a third glass in spite of the good counsel and disapprobation of his friends, and after prattling a little longer amid the laughter of his audience, he suddenly became silent, looked fixedly at a lady sitting opposite to him, dropped his head, and fell asleep. I thought that he could not present himself for the examination that day, but was mistaken. A short hour later they awakened him; he went up stairs to wash his face, ran off to the university still drowsy, took his examination, and was promoted, to the greater glory of the wine of Xerez and Spanish diplomacy.

I devoted the following days to visiting the monuments, or, to be more accurate, the ruins of the Moorish monuments which besides the Alhambra and the Generalife attest the ancient splendor of Granada. Insomuch as it was the last bulwark of Islam, Granada is the city which presents the most numerous relics of all the cities of Spain. On the hill called the hill of Dinadamar (the Fountain of Tears) one may still see the ruins of four towers rising at the four corners of a great cistern into which flowed the waters from the Sierra to supply the highest part of the city. There were baths, gardens, and villas of which not a trace remains: from that point one overlooked the city with its minarets, its terraces, and its mosques gleaming among the palms and cypresses. Near there one sees a Moorish gate called the gate of Elvira—a great arch crowned with battlements—and beyond it are the ruins of the palaces of the caliphs. Near the Alameda promenade stands a square tower in which there is a great hall ornamented with the usual Arabian inscriptions. Near the convent of San Domingo are the remains of gardens and palaces once joined to the Alhambra by a subterranean passage. Within the city is the Alcaiceria, a Moorish market almost perfectly preserved, formed of a few little streets as straight and narrow as corridors, lined with two rows of shops, one adjoining the other, and presenting the strange appearance of an Asiatic bazaar. In short, one cannot take a step in Granada without coming face to face with an arch, an arabesque, a column, or a pile of stones which suggests its fantastic, luxurious past.

What turns and windings have I not made through those tortuous streets at the hottest hour of the day, under a sun that shrivelled my brain, without meeting a living soul! At Granada, as in the other cities of Andalusia, the people are alive only at night, and the night repays them for the imprisonment of the day; the public promenades are crowded and confused by the hurry and jostling of a multitude, one half of which seems to be seeking the other half upon urgent business. The crowd is densest in the Alameda, but, for all that, I spent my evenings on the Alameda with Gongora, who talked to me of Moorish monuments, and with a journalist who discoursed on politics, and also with another young man who talked of women, and frequently with all three of them together, to my infinite pleasure, because those cheery meetings, like those of school-boys, at odd times and places, refreshed my mind, to steal a beautiful simile, like a summer shower refreshes the grass as it falls faster and faster, dancing for joy.

If I were obliged to say something about the people of Granada, I should be embarrassed, because I have not seen them. In the day-time I met no one in the streets, and at night I could not see them. The theatres were not open, and when I might have found some one in the city I was wandering through the halls or avenues of the Alhambra; and then I had so much to do to see everything in the short time which I had allowed myself that no unoccupied moments remained for those chance conversations, like the ones I had in the other cities, in the streets and the cafÉs, with whomever I happened to meet.

But from what I learned from men who were in a position to give me trustworthy information, the people of Granada do not enjoy an enviable reputation in Spain. They are said to be ill-tempered, violent, vindictive, and bloodthirsty; and this arraignment is not disproved by the pages of the city newspapers. It is not publicly stated, but every one knows it for a fact, that popular instruction in Granada is at a lower ebb than even in Seville and the other smaller Spanish cities, and, as a rule, everything that cannot be produced by the sun and the soil, which produce so bountifully, goes to the bad, either through indolence or ignorance or shiftlessness. Granada is not connected by railway with any important city: she lives alone, surrounded by her gardens, enclosed by her mountains, happy with the fruits which Nature produces under her hand, gently lulling herself to sleep in the vanity of her beauty and the pride of her history—idle, drowsy, and fanciful, content to answer with a yawn to any one who reproves her for her condition: "I gave Spain the painter Alonzo Cano, the poet Louis de Leon, the historian Fernando de Castillo, the sacred orator Luis di Grenada, and the minister Martinez de la Rosas. I have paid my debt, leave me in peace;" and this is the reply made by almost all the southern cities of Spain, more beautiful, alas! than wise and industrious, and proud rather than civilized. Ah! one who has seen them can never have done exclaiming, "What a pity!"

"Now that you have seen all the marvels of Moorish art and tropical vegetation there remains the suburb of the Albaicin to be seen before you can say that you know Granada. Prepare your mind for a new world, put your hand on your purse, and follow me."

So said Gongora to me on the last evening of my sojourn in Granada. A Republican journalist was with us, Melchiorre Almago by name, the director of the Idea, a congenial, affable young man, who to accompany us sacrificed his dinner and a leading article that he had been cogitating since morning.

We walked on until we came to the square of the Audiencia. There Gongora pointed out an alley winding up a hill, and said to me, "Here commences the Albaicin;" and SeÑor Melchiorre, touching a house with his cane, added, "Here commences the territory of the republic."

We turned up the alley, passed from it into another, and from that into a third, always ascending, without my seeing anything extraordinary, although I looked curiously in every direction. Narrow streets, squalid houses, old women dozing on the doorsteps, mothers carefully inspecting their children's heads, gaping dogs, crowing cocks, ragged boys running and shouting, and the other things that one always sees in the suburbs; but in those streets nothing more. But gradually, as we ascended, the appearance of the houses and the people began to change; the roofs became lower, the windows fewer, the doors smaller, and the people more ragged. In the middle of every street ran a little stream in a walled gutter, in the Moorish style; here and there over the doors and around the windows one saw the remains of arabesques and fragments of columns, and in the corners of the squares fountains and well-curbs of the time of the Moorish dominion. At every hundred steps it seemed as if we had gone back fifty years toward the age of the caliphs. My two companions touched me on the elbow from time to time, saying as they did so, "Look at that old woman!"—"Look at that little girl!"—"Look at that man!" and I looked, and asked, "Who are these people?" If I had unexpectedly found myself in that place, I should have believed on seeing those men and women that I was in an African village, so strange were the faces, the dress, the manner of moving, talking, and looking, at so short a distance from the centre of Granada—so different were they from the people that I had seen up to that time. At every turn I stopped to look in the face of my companions, and they answered, "That is nothing; we are now in the civilized part of the Albaicin; this is the Parisian quarter of the suburb; let us go on."

We went on, and the streets seemed like the bed of a torrent—paths hollowed out among the rocks, all banks and gullies, broken and stony—some so steep that a mule could not climb them, others so narrow that a man could scarcely pass; some blocked by women and children sitting on the ground, others grass-grown and deserted; and all so squalid, wild, and uncouth that the most wretched of our villages cannot give one an idea of them, because this is a poverty that bears the impress of another race and another continent. We turned into a labyrinth of streets, passing from time to time under a great Moorish arch or through a high square from which one commanded a view of the wide valleys, the snow-covered mountains, and a part of the lower city, until finally we arrived at a street rougher and narrower than any we had yet seen; and there we stopped to take breath.

"Here commences the real Albaicin," said the young archeologist. "Look at that house!"

I looked; it was a low, smoke-stained, ruinous house, with a door that seemed like the mouth of a cavern, before which one saw, under a mass of rags, a group, or rather a heap, of old women and little children, who upon our approach raised their eyes heavy with sleep, and with bony hands removed from the threshold some filth which impeded our passage.

"Let us enter," said my friend.

"Enter?" I demanded.

If they had told me that beyond those walls there was a facsimile of the famous Court of Miracles which Victor Hugo has described, I should not have doubted their word. No door has ever said more emphatically than that, "Stand back!" I cannot find a better comparison than the gaping mouth of a gigantic witch breathing out pestilential vapors. But I took courage and entered.

Oh, marvellous! It was the court of a Moorish house surrounded by graceful little columns surmounted by lovely arches, with those indescribable traceries of the Alhambra along the porticoes and around the mullioned windows, with the beams and ceiling carved and enamelled with little niches for vases of flowers and urns of perfume, with a pool in the middle, and all the traces and memorials of the delicate life of an opulent family. And in that house lived those wretched people!

We went out and entered other houses, in all of which I found some fragments of Moorish architecture and sculpture. From time to time Gongora would say to me, "This was a harem. Those were the baths of the women; up yonder was the chamber of a favorite;" and I fixed my eyes upon every bit of the arabesqued wall and upon all the little columns of the windows, as if to ask them for a revelation of their secrets—only a name or a magic word with which I might reconstruct in an instant the ruined edifice and summon the beautiful Arabians who had dwelt there. But, alas! amid the columns and under the arches of the windows there were only rags and wrinkled faces.

Among other houses, we entered one where we found a group of girls sewing under the shade of a tree in the courtyard, directed by an old woman. They were all working upon a great piece of cloth that seemed like a mat or a bed-spread, in black and gray stripes. I approached and asked one of the girls, "What is this?"

They all looked up and with a concerted movement spread the cloth open, so that I could see their work plainly. Almost before I had seen it I cried, "I will buy it."

They all began to laugh. It was the mantle of an Andalusian mountaineer, made to wear in the saddle, rectangular in form, with an opening in the middle to put one's head through, embroidered in bright-colored worsteds along the two shortest sides and around the opening. The design of the embroideries, which represented birds and fantastic flowers, green, blue, white, red, and yellow, all in a mass, was as crude as a pattern a child might make: the beauty of the work lay altogether in the harmony of the colors, which was truly marvellous. I cannot express the sensation produced by the sight of that mantle, except by saying that it laughed and filled one with its cheerfulness; and it seems to me impossible to imagine anything gayer, more festive, or more childishly and gracefully capricious. It was a thing to look upon in order to bring yourself out of a bad humor, or when you wish to write a pretty verse in a lady's album, or when you are expecting a person whom you wish to receive with your brightest smile.

"When will you finish these embroideries?" I asked one of the girls.

"Hoy mismo" (to-day), they all replied in chorus.

"And what is the mantle worth?"

"Cinco" (five), stammered one.

The old women pierced her with a glance which seemed to say, "Blockhead!" and answered hastily, "Six duros."

Six duros are thirty francs; it did not seem much to me, and I put my hand in my pocket.

Gongora cast a withering glance at me which seemed to say, "You simpleton!" and, drawing me back by the arm, said, "One moment: six duros is an exorbitant price."

The old woman shot him another glance which seemed to say, "Brigand!" and replied, "I cannot take less."

Gongora gave her another glance, which seemed to say, "Liar!" and said, "Come, now; you can take four duros; you would not ask more from the country-people."

The old woman insisted, and for a while we continued to exchange with our eyes the titles of simpleton, swindler, marplot, liar, pinch-penny, spend-thrift, until the mantle was sold to me for five duros, and I paid and left my address, and we went out blessed and commended to God by the old woman and followed a good way by the black eyes of the embroiderers.

We went on from street to street, among houses increasingly wretched and growing blacker and blacker, and more revolting rags and faces. But we never came to the end, and I asked my companions, "Will you have the goodness to tell me if Granada has any limits, and if so where they are? May one ask where we are going and how we shall return home?" But they simply laughed and went forward.

"Is there anything stranger than this to be seen?" I asked at a certain point.

"Stranger?" they both replied. "This second part of the suburb which you have seen still belongs to civilization: if not the Parisian, it is at least the Madrid, quarter of the Albaicin, and there is something else; let us go on."

We passed through a very small street containing some scantily-clothed women, who looked like people fallen from the moon; crossed a little square full of babies and pigs in friendly confusion; passed through two or three other alleys, now climbing, now descending, now in the midst of houses, now among piles of rubbish, now between trees and now among rocks, until we finally arrived at the solitary place on a hillside from which we saw in front the Generalife, to the right the Alhambra, and below a deep valley filled with a dense wood.

It was growing dark; no one was in sight and not a voice was heard.

"Is this the end of the suburb?" I asked.

My two companions laughed and said, "Look in that direction."