I Am Not Going To Set Up Rival To The Colored Picture Postals, Which Give A Better Notion Than I Could Give Of The Painted And Gilded Stucco Decoration, The Ingenious Geometrical Designs On The Walls, And The Cloying Sweetness Of The Honeycombing In The Vaulted Roofs.

Every one will have his feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little goes a great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the Greek or the Renaissance.

If the phrase did not insult the sex which the faith of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one's slight for it in the word effeminate.

The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated with the week's wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of a lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down through the slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides, they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national courtship going on at another casement, but that was at night, and here the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o'clock in the morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover stationed outside the shutter with which the iron bars forbade him the closest contact; and it is only fair to say that he minded nobody; he was there when we went in and there when we came out, and it appears that when it is a question of love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at least, the lover did not seem to miss the moon.

He was only an incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me revert from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them on any pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves in the gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our patriotic Granadan guide, wtho had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, but coal-black hair for all his other blondness.

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