I Am Not Sure But I Valued The House Of Alva Somewhat For The Chance My Visit To It Gave Me Of Seeing A Sevillian Tenement-House Such As I Had Hoped I Might See.

One hears that such houses are very scrupulously kept by the janitors who compel the tenants to a cleanliness not perhaps always their nature.

At any rate, this one, just across the way from the Alva House, was of a surprising neatness. It was built three stories high, with galleries looking into an open court and doors giving from these into the several tenements. As fortune, which does not continually smile on travel, would have it that morning, two ladies of the house were having a vivid difference of opinion on an upper gallery. Or at least one was, for the other remained almost as silent as the spectators who grouped themselves about her or put their heads out of the windows to see, as well as hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I would tell the reader. The injured party, and I am sure she must have been deeply injured, showered her enemy with reproaches, and each time when she had emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of her hands in the wrong-doer's face she went away a few yards and filled them up again and then returned for a fresh discharge. It was perfectly like a scene of Goldoni and like many a passage of real life in his native city, and I was rapt in it across fifty years to the Venice I used to know. But the difference in Seville was that there was actively only one combatant in the strife, and the witnesses took no more part in it than the passive resistant.

VI

As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so wholly violent but that it was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of the houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesiastics somehow related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva's palace was so narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, and we should never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he had not politely pushed the side of his pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we did get to the Casa de los Venerables we found it mildly yellow-washed and as beautifully serene and sweet as the house of venerable men should be. Its distinction in a world of _patios_ was a _patio_ where the central fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and encircled by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other merits, but the fine staircase that ended under a baroque dome left us facing a bolted door, so that we had to guess at those attractions, which I leave the reader to imagine in turn.

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