to whisper to Mrs. Sinallchange as they left
the building: " I suppose nothing could be
done to stop it now?"

UP AND DOWN THE GIRALDA.

THERE were but a few hours left to me in
Seville, and I had to go to the government
cigar manufactory and to ascend the Moorish
tower of the Giralda.

I was anxious to see the cigar-making,
because smoking is so pre-eminently a
Spanish national habit, and this manufacturing
palace is the well-spring of Spanish
smoking. All the tobacco comes from Cadiz.
Cadiz, the bright Venice of Iberia, is the
dépôt of tho Havannah leaf, and its quays
are heaped up with the dry, scented,
brown-veined leaves which contain that precious
soothing balm to the worn and sorrowful,
which the Spaniard loves so well to extract
and turn to vapour in the red crucible of
a pipe-bowl. In all places Spaniards smoke;
whether they be fruit-sellers sitting beside
their green and golden pyramid of melons;
whether a butcher, grand over his gilt and
painted scales; whether a bare-breasted porter
asleep with his rough head resting, like
wandering Jacob, on a seaside rock; whether
tight-coated custom-house officials, or lovers
clinging at midnight to the grating that
shuts in a mistress; whether on mule, in
boat, in vineyard, pepper-picking, or
grape-treading; the Spaniard smokes, as if he were
born for that special purpose and for no
other.

I had traversed over and over the fashionable
walks on the bank of the Guadalquivir,
where tides of carriages roll between shores
of dusty trees. I knew the old Alameda,
with its faded palaces, now inn-yards, and its
benches where peasants sit and smoke and
gossip till the star-lamps are lit all at once by
the celestial lamplighters, and the streets of
Heaven outshine the streets of earth. I had
wandered all round the five miles of yellow
battlemented walls, and worked in and out
of the unwatched gates. I had mused, as is
expected of one, in the Prado de San Sebastian,
where the Inquisition once lighted its fires,
and where good men were translated to the
other world, on fiery wings, while princes,
bishops, courtiers, jesters, wits, and ladies,
in a circumambient tide of cloth of gold
and jewelled silks, looked on, chattering and
fan-playing. The naked gipsy children and
the beggar gamblers I had seen and
sketched.

Now, I skulk from the intolerant sun, walking
along the dark rivulet of shadow on the
left-hand side of the street. Not far from the
gate of San Fernando, I find the tobacco
manufactory, whose vast roofs— for there are
twenty-eight court-yard squares in this one
cincture of walls—cover a hideous jumble of
passages, cloisters, terraced inclosures, and
factory halls, the work of a Dutch projector
in seventeen hundred and fifty-seven. It has
a moat, and has been, in its time, fortified
against the Carlists; although its yellow
stucco does not appear so much as pitted
with shot. I see nothing of the four thousand
cigar-makers of Seville as I go into the
porter's lodge, where two or three idle, seedy,
lounging warders drone away the hot hours;
but I wait in that dingy guard-room while
one of the pauper warders goes to some still
idler superior with my card. The only
visible thing in the room is an almanac, dead
and ante-dated, with a Catherine-wheel cobweb
spun over its face; and, on the window-sill
which looks into the court-yard, is the
invariable Arab water-jar, placed ready for
the stranger or chance-comer, be he "king
or peasant, friend or dun. It is of the usual
dirty white kid-glove colour, and is now, as
I raise it to my thirsty lips, empty: all but a
mocking drop that trickles gratefully on my
tongue. I pronounce a blessing on the last
drinker, which puts me in a right state of
mind to wait ten long Spanish minutes for
my messenger who, at last, returns, and leads
me off down purgatorial passages, playing
the Virgil to my Dante.

I first go through courts where splashing
fountains toss about silver prodigally over
their octagonal marble basins and circumjacent
court-yard stones; which it renders
luminously and transparently wet. I see,
everywhere, empty piles of square packing-cases
of this precious weed. I enter the low,
dark, shady cellar rooms on the ground-floor,
where the celebrated rappee snuff—the snuff
that, in Louis the Fourteenth books and in
the Spectator and Tatler period, was called
The Spanish, par excellence. This is the snuff
which, put as a joke in his wine, killed the
wit and verse-maker Santeuil. This was the
irritating scented dust that was the special
luxury of the clergy of this priest-haunted
city in the good old times, when bands
of black shovel-hats filled the city squares
and public places. Here are brown
snuff-coloured men tinting the black chocolate-like
powder with ochrous earth from the
seaport of Carthagena. I look like a mad
apothecary who has covered himself with his
own drugs; for my black coat is covered with
the rhubarb-coloured dust, and I grow snuffier
than the snuffiest canon that ever drawled a
mass. The guide tells me that snuffing, in the
old times, was more common than smoking.
I have no respect for the habit: so I sneeze
loudly in protest, passing it off as the infirmity
of a stranger. There they go on, those
brown old men, chopping the leaves ready for
grinding on huge oak blocks, which are yellow
and dusty. There are scuppers and troughs
full of the black treacherous powder, and
there are vats of black treacle, with sticky
bubbles rising to the surface, in which some
of the tobacco is steeped and glued together.
The men, I observe, seem working more like
careless soldiers engaged on public works,