The very beggars and guides who hung about the grove and the hotel got to know us so well that they gave up hoping to make anything out of us. At the end-but after many weeks-even the Gipsy King ceased asking us to buy his photograph, and it was only a strange hand that was stretched out to us, only a strange voice that hissed «Mossou! Madama!»> into our ears, as we passed the tree at the corner of the road under the garden dining-room, which was the beggars' head

VOL. LII.-27.

quarters. There they were at all hours-the diseased, the deformed, and the maimed, gipsies and dogs. Each new guest at the hotel coming down for early coffee, if unwary enough to go near the edge of the terrace, would be welcomed by a hideous chorus from under the tree, «Sst, sssst, mossou, madama; señora, sst, señora, sst, señor, sssst,» mingled with the loud yelping of half-starved mongrels. Or else they all had a way of disappearing, no one knew where, only to set a

200

DRAWN BY JOSEPH PENNELL.

THE FISH-POND IN THE ALHAMBRA.

worse snare for the unsuspecting. I saw a Frenchman, his first morning at the Roma, lean over the garden's balustrade and carelessly drop a penny to a small ragged boy, the only creature in sight. In a second the road swarmed with gipsies, babies, cripples, all struggling and fighting and screaming. It was the only time I ever knew the Gipsy King to unbend from his dignity, but then he groveled. The Spanish beggar was altogether too much of a bully to move me to sentiment or sympathy, and for the first time in my life my love for the gipsy weakened. I have more than once in my day wandered far and wide on the track of the Romany; but, now that he was here close at hand, he begged too impudently for me to want to hail him as brother, or to visit him on his hillside. Nor had any of the others that elegance and urbanity of manner of which one reads in books. None ever called J. «caballero »; they were far more apt to swear like troopers when we left them empty-handed.

The guides were as bad. It was an evil day for posterity when Washington Irving let him

self be imposed upon by Mateo Ximenes. We might have been left in peace, but the evening coach had only to bring to the Roma a stray traveler for them all to reappear-in the hall, on the steps, in the garden-as inevitably as the beggars under the tree. Then we were sure to see the white flannels and red sash of Mariano, as unprincipled a young wretch as ever lived, knowing nothing but what he had far better not have known, though his pockets bulged with cards of approval from gushing young ladies, mostly American. Then, at every turn we stumbled upon the new Mateos, not in picturesque rags, but in very correct clothes and broad-brimmed hats, as likely as not reading Murray over their victims' shoulders, cramming for the coming walk. And then, too, there was no escape from a perfect pest of a small boy, who apparently had been too much for the temper of tourists of all nations; for, dancing his war-dance in front of the foreigner, he would shriek like a little fiend, «Allez-vous en! Get out! Go away! Via! Get out!»>

At such times the bric-a-brac dealer was seen in the hotel. Usually he kept to his shop in the Calle de los Gomeres, where there was little to buy at a price that would be the envy of Wardour street. The guides probably could best have explained how it was that he always had prompt hint of a possible bargain. In these emergencies he was really great. I have

VI.

Of course a time came when we did go down into the town. For one thing, we had to visit our bankers; that paid for the walk down the hill and the dreadful pull up again in the broiling sun, with not the faintest whiff of the cool breeze that, in fiction, always is blowing from the Sierra. For then we were sure to return with more money than we had expected. I do not pretend to explain these things, but for every hundred dollars we drew on our letter of credit we were given what seemed to us a hundred and twenty, or thirty, in pesetas, so that the exchange alone kept us going for a week. J. was so pleased that he had a wonderful scheme for turning every dollar he might earn into pesetas until he blossomed forth a millionaire. The afternoon the idea occurred to him was quite the most animated of the summer. His ardor cooled, however, when he realized that he would be a poor man when he left Spain.

thing else, for all they knew or cared. The celebration itself did not help to explain matters. Lanterns hung from every tree in the plaza. There was a crowd of water-carriers, and donkeys, and women, and priests, and children, and soldiers, and men selling big round cakes that looked like undersized New England pies with nothing inside. Rockets were let off at rare intervals, and a band, all drums and cymbals, played with just such a brazen, barbarous beating and clashing as the Moors must have made as they marched past to one of their periodical musters in the Vivarrambla. That was all, so that the connection with Columbus was not very obvious. But the prettiest part of the pageant was on our way back, when, at the top of the Calle de los Gomeres, we saw a group of girls in the gateway, a white barricade against the darkness of the wood. They broke away, dancing, as we came, and we followed them up the steepest of the three parting roads in pursuit of a distant sound of music. The scene held out

promise of the traditional Spanish night attuned to the click of castanets and the thrumming of guitars. But within the Alhambra's inclosure we found nothing more romantic than a man with an accordion, and a few couples waltzing under the trees. For the national dance and song the stranger must go to the show held by guides and gipsies somewhere on the Albaycin; it is supposed to be improper, though it is at the most only stupid, and for this you must pay in pesetas. But never once in Granada's open streets and courts, or in those of any other Andalusian town, did we hear the castanets and guitars that play so seductively through the Andalusia of romance and Murray. That they should still be expected really shows how hard tradition dies. «Am I, then, come into Spain to hear humstrums and hurdy-gurdies?» Beckford asked indignantly a hundred years ago. But every new traveler goes to the country, sure that for him, at least, there will be the sweet strumming and mad fandango all the long Southern night under the

stars.

These first excursions into Granada led to others, when we learned that the town was not all shabby suburbs and dirty streets, as it had seemed on the afternoon of our arrival. I have said there was no music; there was as little costume, while the house making exhibition of its patio for the benefit of travel-writer was in modest minority. It was trying, too, to find the Zacatin restored; the Moors' Vivarrambla the most commonplace of the town's sunny squares; the Genil and Darro, that flow so gaily through ballad and story, tiny rivulets lost in wide, dry river-beds. But Granada had beauties less advertised in guidebooks, less conspicuous in history. To dive into its narrow streets, to brave the glare of its open places, was to come face to face, now with enchanting little houses decked with gay balconies of flowers, now with a stately doorway ennobling the plainest façade; and again with convents, the delicious white bareness of their walls relieved by grille and loggia; or a monastery transformed into a prison, with prisoners chattering behind the bars of wide windows looking immediately upon the street; or high gardens full of palms and oleanders; or a palatial old poorhouse, its loveliness as small help to the aged and infirm grouped listlessly at its entrance, waiting for death, as is the greatness of Spain's Moorish past to its hopeless and decrepit present; or a chance open door showing a tumble-down Moorish patio and room hung with brasses; or an ancient courtyard become a mere public stable,

horses and mules rubbing up against bits of delicate tracery, straw and hay piled high on balconies which retain their elegance even in decay. Under the cathedral's shadow there was always a market, all life and color and pots and flowers and beggars; up the steep streets of the Albaycin, and of the hill of the Vermilion Towers, there were always donkeys, and men in broad-brimmed hats, and women in long shawls, shading face and flower-decked hair with their fans; in front of the big inns below there were sometimes yellow coaches, with theatrical driver and mules; and always and everywhere were the water-carriers, their bottles swathed in cool green branches, their cry of «Agua! agua fresca!» sounding high above the noises of the street. Nor was there a walk that did not reward with lovely glimpse of vega or one of Granada's palace-crowned, house-laden hillsides; while to mount to the lonely church and grass-grown square on the Albaycin's top was to see, as in a picture, the Red Palace on the opposite height. As a view it savored perhaps too much of the panorama; but it explained, as nothing else could, how the great red walls and towers rise up from their tree-covered base at the very edge of the precipice; how a deep cleft separates the Alhambra from the Generalife, white amid its cypresses and oranges, backed by an olivegrown hillside; how beyond both stretches the great range of the Sierra Nevada, bare and brown in the midsummer sunshine.

And then, seeing, we realized that no one can describe the beauty of the place; no one has; no one ever will.

It was in its churches that I thought Granada at once most magnificent and beggarly, most solemn and gay. I know nothing in France or Italy to compare with the effect of the cathedral when the sun-steeped streets were left, the leather curtain was lifted, and we were suddenly in darkness as of night, a great altar looming dimly in far shadows, vague, motionless figures prostrate before it. Their silent fervor in the strange, scented dusk gave a clue to the ecstasy of a Theresa, of an Ignatius. But it was well to turn back quickly into matter-of-fact daylight. To linger was to be reminded that mystery has its price, solemnity its tawdriness. In cathedral and capilla real, if we ventured to look at the royal tombs, at the grille,-which even in Spain is without equal,—at the retablos, with their wealth of ornament, one sacristan after another kept close at our heels, impudently expectant. If in unknown little church our eyes grew accustomed to darkness, it was that they might be offended with Virgins