While We Looked Away And Away, The Gardener And A Half-Grown Boy Were About Their Labors That Sunday Afternoon As If It Were A Week-Day, Though For That Reason Perhaps They Were Not Working Very Hard.

They seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy was assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them.

We tried to find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not know why he was doing it, and I must be content to contribute the bare fact to the science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness, and was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and litter the grass. There was apparently a passion for neatness throughout, which in the villa itself mounted to ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and lived in at any moment, though I believe it was occupied only in the late spring and the early autumn; in winter the noble family went to Madrid, and in summer to some northern watering-place. It was rather small, and expressed a life of the minor hospitalities when the family was in residence. It was no place for house-parties, and scarcely for week-end visits, or even for neighborhood dinners. Perhaps on that terrace there was afternoon ice-cream or chocolate for friends who rode or drove over or out; it seemed so possible that we had to check in ourselves the cozy impulse to pull up our shell-covered cement chairs to some central table of like composition.

Within, the villa was of a spick-and-spanness which I feel that I have not adequately suggested; and may I say that the spray of a garden-hose seemed all that would be needed to put the place in readiness for occupation? Not that even this was needed for that interior of tile and marble, so absolutely apt for the climate and the use the place would be put to. In vain we conjectured, and I hope not impertinently, the characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue that offered itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but they were such as these, not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays. I recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I wish I knew who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have a fondness for such dangerous ground; from some of their novels it appears they feel it rather chic to venture on it.

IX

We came away from Cordova with a pretty good conscience as to its sights. Upon the whole we were glad they were so few, when once we had made up our minds about the mosque. But now I have found too late that we ought to have visited the general market in the old square where the tournaments used to take place; we ought to have seen also the Chapel of the Hospital del Cardenal, because it was part of the mosque of Al-Manssour; we ought to have verified the remains of two baths out of the nine hundred once existing in the Calle del Bagno Alta; and we ought finally to have visited the remnant of a Moorish house in the Plazuela de San Nicolas, with its gallery of jasper columns, now unhappily whitewashed. The Campo Santo has an unsatisfied claim upon my interest because it was the place where the perfervid Christian zealots used to find the martyrdom they sought at the hands of the unwilling Arabs; and where, far earlier, Julius Caesar planted a plane tree after his victory over the forces of Pompeii at Munda. The tree no longer exists, but neither does Caesar, or the thirty thousand enemies whom he slew there, or the sons of Pompeii who commanded them. These were so near beating Casar at first that he ran among his soldiers "asking them whether they were not ashamed to deliver him into the hands of boys." One of the boys escaped, but two days after the fight the head of the elder was brought to Caesar, who was not liked for the triumph he made himself after the event in Rome, where it was thought out of taste to rejoice over the calamity of his fellow-countrymen as if they had been foreign foes; the Romans do not seem to have minded his putting twenty-eight thousand Cordovese to death for their Pompeian politics. If I had remembered all this from my Plutarch, I should certainly have gone to see the place where Caesar planted that plane tree. Perhaps some kind soul will go to see it for me. I myself do not expect to return to Cordova.

IX

FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

Cordova seemed to cheer up as much as we at our going. We had undoubtedly had the better night's sleep; as often as we woke we found Cordova awake, walking and talking, and coughing more than the night before, probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. From time to time there were church-bells, variously like tin pans and iron pots in tone, without sonorousness in their noise, or such wild clangor as some Italian church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through it, and at the station was lively with the arriving and departing trains. The morning was not only bright; it was hot, and the place babbled with many voices. We thought one voice crying "Agua, agua!" was a parrot's and then we thought it was a girl's, but really it was a boy with water for sale in a stone bottle. He had not a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he had been a girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red.

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