There Were Streets That Crooked Away Everywhere, Not Going Anywhere, And Breaking From Time To Time Into Irregular Angular Spaces With A Church Or A Convent Or A Nobleman's House Looking Into Them.

VI The noblemen's houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or street, and hid their inner

Glories with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with which they opened their _patios_ to the gaze of the stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide. The passing tram-car might grind him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers to the _patios,_ but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains potted round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen the family life there; and people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as well as look within. But one who would not press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by finding some of the _patios_ too new-looking, with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the winter. The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of climates where they are so easily convertible. The _patio_ is the place of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the _tertulia,_ and the family nightly meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One _patio_ is often much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as the _patio_ of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her _patio_ a sort of shrine to him. The famous _espada_ perished in his heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.

Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod.

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