Leas, and till it is completed, is believed,
according to the latest accounts, to have taken
up his residence at the rectory.

HIDDEN CHORDS

The present hour repeats upon its strings
Echoes of some vague dream we have forgot;
Dim voices whisper half-remember'd things,
And when we pause to listen, answer not.

Forebodings come: we know not how, or whence,
Shadowing a nameless fear upon the soul,
And stir within our hearts a subtler sense,
Than light may read or wisdom may control.

And who can tell what secret links of thought
Bind heart to heart? Unspoken things are heard,
As if within our deepest selves was brought
The soul, perhaps, of some unutter'd word.

But, though a veil of shadow hangs between
That hidden life, and what we see and hear,
Let us revere the power of the Unseen,
Because a world of mystery is near.

SPANISH HOTELS.

I LOOK out of my hotel window, in the
Square of the Magdalen at Seville, and feel,
in the fiery heat, that I have put my head in
at a furnace door, so I push it back again
behind the dim striped blue and red curtain,
that I am all day furling and drawing and
tying down, to try and screen out my blinding
enemy, the Spanish sun, that seems
determined to reduce me to a Lot's
wife-heap of grey ash, just as I have done my
last cigar.

But quick out and in as my head went, it
was long enough to take a flying eye-shot
down below in the corner of the square, at the
grand tinselled lemonade stand that, night
and day, stares at the hotel door. Can I
believe my eyes? why the name of the
proprietor, duly labelled in long, spindly, rickety
yellow letters, is—no? yes! is Colon—
(COLUMBUS). Columbus in the city where the
tower still exists in which his Indian gold was
piled; where his son sleeps his last sleep. It
does one good to see the great name even on
a lemonade stall, and I feel that I am indeed
not in the modern Spain of great words and
little deeds: but of the old Spain of great
deeds and few words. I feel as one does,
when one sees a boy Shakespeare playing at
marbles in Stratford-on-Avon; or as when I
first recognised the name of Quixote over a
butcher's shop in a back street in Barcelona.
On looking again, I found the great man's
descendant decidedly oily of face, and dirty of
hand.  As to discovering a new world, I do
not think anything but my hat full of
shillings would have induced the lazy loafing
rascal to walk ten times up and down the
gravelled square, benched round and treed
round, with its little stone Magdalene weeping
all day (like a water-hour-glass) into the
fountain's marble font.  The stall of our friend
Columbus was a wooden erection, painted red
and green, and coarse yellow, with a
pyramidal shelved stand of red bottles of syrups
and orgeats; above them a tinselled daub of
the Virgin. It was pleasant to see the
complacent idleness with which all day Columbus
sat behind the dirty tablecloth of his stall
rubbing his brass taps bright, or smearingly
cleaning his glass tumblers. Now
chatting lazily in his shirt-sleeves with a
thirsty muleteer, whose beasts are laden
with trailing panniers of white gesso for
building, or coolly sitting down with two
or three of our pink-jacketed waiters; who,
putting their heads together, read the Gazette,
and rail at Orgulloso Albion (proud Albion):
being rank Afrancesados, occasionally smiling
and winking in my direction, to indicate that
I am one of the hated race who so much
hindered the expulsion of the French from
Spain. The donkeys give a battle snort
or practise their dreadful octaves down
a distant street, as if chiding their lazy
driver, and away he runs, with his short whip
stuck in his greasy sash that before now has
bound up knife wounds and swabbed nasty
stab holes—away, in the Triano, or poor
quarter, where the green shining jars and
cream-coloured pipkins, that Murillo liked to
paint, are still made in such numbers, that
the front of the hovels near the bridge seems
a perfect Pharaoh's brick-kiln. Now from the
pathway runs a mule-boy, and steals a hasty
farthing's-worth of strange straw-coloured
drink, By-and-by a soldier drinks gravely
a red glassful. O, Columbus! did thou
discover a world, and yet left no copyright of it
to thy truckling and degenerate kinsmen?
Columbus a water-seller, Quixote a butcher,
Cervantes a tailor, arid Calderon keeping a
brandy-shop. How are the mighty fallen!

But I only sketch Columbus, the water-
seller, because he is just under my hotel
window, and I want to describe my Seville
hotel and some other such caravanserais, to
show in what points they differ from the
hotels of the country I grumble at, but allow
no one else to. Say I am just here from
unknown seas. I came up the Guadalquivir
(the Arab river) in the boat with the
grumbling English engineer aboard, the grimy
hot man, who came up, like Zamiel, from the
great subterranean fires, and voluteered
objections to the whole navigation of the muddy,
flat-shored, extraordinary river. "There
haint water enough to begin with," said the
suffering man, wiping his streaming forehead
with the black oil rag he kept for special
points of the machinery; "take the passengers
again," said the martyr and noble exile,
"they'd have blowed her up long ago, if it
was not for me," he added, and then dived
below to take a part at all fours. Then there
was the dry, sour-faced waiter, who astonished
me by suddenly proclaiming himself an
Englishman shrugging and smirking
contemptuously to me at the Spaniards dining