In The Evening We Heard Them In The Billiard-Room Below Lifting Their Voices In The Lays Of Our College Muse, And Waking To Ecstasy The Living Piano In The Strains Of Our National Ragtime.

They were never intrusively cheerful; one might remain, in spite of them, as dispirited as the place would have

One; but as far as the _genius loci_ would let me, I liked them; and so far as I made their acquaintance I thought that they were very intelligently carrying out the enterprise imagined for them.

VIII

I wish now that I had known them well enough to ask them what they candidly thought of the city of which I felt the witchery under the dying day I have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of them. It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very badly and was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst places are in the older quarters, where the streets are very crooked and very narrow, so narrow that the tram-car can barely scrape through them. They are old enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides could identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a moment I did so, but upon second thought I unpinned it.

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