In Our Own Surprise And Alarm We Partook Of The Taciturnity Of The Witnesses, Which I Think Was Rather Fine And Was Much Decenter Than Any Sort Of Utterance.

On our way home we had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting through the casement of a ground floor.

The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a more inoffensive way of doing it.

By the sort of echo notable in life's experience we had a reverberation of the orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at the time we believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I still doubt whether anywhere in America the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich, sad calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that you do not get this plaintive music without the accompanying note of the hucksters' donkeys, which, if they were better advised, would not close with the sort of inefficient sifflication which they now use in spoiling an otherwise most noble, most leonine roar. But when were donkeys of any sort ever well advised in all respects? Those of Seville, where donkeys abound, were otherwise of the superior intelligence which throughout Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far behind, and constitutes the donkeys, far beyond the idle and useless dogs, the friends of man. They indefinitely outnumber the dogs, and the cats are of course nowhere in the count. Yet I would not misprize the cats of Seville, which apparently have their money price. We stopped to admire a beautiful white one, on our way to see the market one day, praising it as intelligibly as we could, and the owner caught it up, when we had passed and ran after us, and offered to sell it to us.

That might have been because it was near the market where we experienced almost the only mercantile zeal we had known in Spain. Women with ropes and garlands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, and we had hopeful advances from the stalls of salads and fruits, where there was a brave and beautiful show of lettuces and endives, grapes, medlars, and heaps of melons, but no oranges; I do not know why, though there were shining masses of red peppers and green, peppers, and vast earthen bowls with yellow peas soaking in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal sort, especially dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bouquets, perhaps for church offerings. There were mounds of chestnuts, four or five feet high and wide; and these flowers and fruits filled the interior of the market, while the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the outside. There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there were ladies buying, but it is said that the mistresses commonly send their maids for the daily provision.

Ordinarily I should say you could not go amiss for your profit and pleasure in Seville, but there are certain imperative objects of interest like the Casa de Pilatos which you really have to do. Strangely enough, it is very well worth doing, for, though it is even more factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost as great beauty and of greater dignity. Gardens, galleries, staircases, statues, paintings, all are interesting, with a mingled air of care and neglect which is peculiarly charming, though perhaps the keener sensibilities, the morbider nerves may suffer from the glare and hardness of the tiling which render the place so wonderful and so exquisite. One must complain of something, and I complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house being supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem.

It belongs to the Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more comes to it from Madrid than the Duke of Alva comes to his house, which I somehow perversely preferred. For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven _patios,_ all far more forgotten than the four in the House of Pilate, and I could fully glut my love of _patios_ without seeing half of them. Besides, it was in the charge of a typical Spanish family: a lean, leathery, sallow father, a fat, immovable mother, and a tall, silent daughter. The girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy walls, its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy staircase leading to the family rooms overhead, which we could not see. The family stays for a little time only in the spring and fall, but if ever they stay so late as we had come the sunlight lying so soft and warm in the _patio_ and the garden out of it must have made them as sorry to leave it as we were.

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.

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