But Why Do I Gird At That Hotel In Granada As If I Knew Of No Faults In American Hotels?

I know of many and like faults, and I do not know of a single hotel of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as that hotel in Granada.

The details which the sunlight of the morrow revealed to us when we had mastered the mystery of our window-catch and stood again on our balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moonlight picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a more incredible scene of mountain and plain and city, it gave us one particular tree in a garden almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made up of "patines of bright gold." Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,

Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.

IV

But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a romantic novelist. Many other trees in and about Granada were yellower than that one, and the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we left our hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such as travelers use when they do not want some wonder of the world to escape them. Of course there was really no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow a match to light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to smoke. He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying, with a wave of his cigarette, "_N'est ce pas?"_ For the rest he helped himself out willingly with my small Spanish. At the end he would have delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did not repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next day.

Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay basking and dreaming.

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