the trivialities of travel. He jabbers about
Fonda Madrids, Fonda Europas, Fonda la
Regnas, Posadas, and Ventas. He knows
the price of everything, and exactly how
many bottles of Manzanilla (six) it takes
to fill your travelling bota (or leather bag).
He is something between a bagsman, a
chevalier d'industrie in his noviciate, and a
military officer. He smiles at ladies at the
table d'hôte, whispers you, Did you ever
see so fascinating a brunette? stares at her
hard, colours the colour of pickled cabbage
when she looks at him casually on her way
to a slice of melon, plunges into knots of
conversation, talks bad French and worse
Spanish, laments to men in loud voice the
stupid prejudices of my countrymen, who
never find Spaniards—as he has found them
—courteous, affable, hospitable, intellectual,
tolerant, generous, and liberal. Fortywinks is
the strangest and most inconsequential man I
ever met. He came to me wonderfully, and
disappeared wonderfully. He was by turns
condescending and overbearing. He supposed
I was laughing at him; he was sorry to find
Englishmen so unsociable; he was sometimes
ashamed to own them as countrymen. Then,
in the middle of a string of recommendations
of the guides in the last city he was in, he
would plunge again headlong into distant
Spanish conversations down the table,
gesticulating, apologising, making sham jokes
and feeble theorems, then bowing and
scowling until I really trembled for his wits,
till I found on examination he was born
without them. His name he would not give
me, but hinted that it was known, and of
weight. I found it by tracking through the
visitor's book, and asking the waiter, who
had looked at his trunk. Whether he was an
impostor or a fool, I never quite decided.

If I go to Grenada, says Fortywinks, I
must waste no time, but at once ask for
Ben-saken. Without Ben-saken, I shall see
nothing. He, Fortywinks, without Ben-saken,
would have seen nothing. You walk
about in that wonderful, most wonderful
city, and see perhaps a coat of arms over a
door; says Ben-saken, that coat of arms,
Monsieur, was put up by the Duke of Medina
CÅ“li, in fifteen hundred and eighty-six,—the
first of April, fifteen hundred and eighty-six.
So he goes on— wonderful! Perhaps I
thought the age of adventures past? Not
a bit of it. Had I heard of the hotel falling,
in the Calle Francos, Madrid? No? Was
astonished. He was there. Some one building
next door had gradually undermined
the foundations of the hotel. Middle of
the night awoke: floor sloping: slipped on
his stockings, threw his carpet-bag out of
window, ran down, found the stairs full of
ladies in their night-dresses, ran out, looked
back one street off, and saw the hotel fall to
the ground. Was not that an adventure?
That was nothing. Had I been the night-journey
to Grenada? Such a conveyance!
Market-cart—mere market-cart; no sleep;
jolt, jostle, bump, jog.

But, now we are at the Giralda, the great
Moorish tower of beauty, with its frescoed
walls: the sharp square of keen brick, with
the stucco peeling off, as the stone tunicle
is peeling off the Pyramids. We look at
it from all sides. We have seen it illuminated
at night, rising a starry pinnacle
to the blue heaven. We have seen it a
centre-point, in the hot silent Spanish noons,
for the sun to burn. We want to see the
Moorish tower of prayer now from above, and
from the airy summit where the falcons build
and circle, to look down on the Arab river,
and the great mob of brown-roofed houses,
convents (now factories), and Renaissance-foliated
palaces, all girdled in by five miles of
crumbling walls, where the aloe bristles, and
the bramble crawls, and twines its thorny
chains round its purple fruit. We want to
see the relative positions of the noble, and
the gipsies' quarter; the relative preponderance
of the mediæval Roman, and Moorish
cities; of Aboo-Yoosoof-Yacoob's city and
that of Columbus or Charles the Fifth.

So I and Fortywinks—disregarding the
yellow flower-stalk pinnacles, countless as
the alpine peaks of the cathedral that
supplanted the mosque of the Faithful, the doors
netted round and banded over by stone
tracery, the guardian porter saints who heed
neither the righteous nor the sinner who
enter, the Pharisee priest, or the publican
muleteer—push on past the stone terraces
and broken Roman pillars chained together
in a rude jailer way that surround the
church, and enter the enclosure leading
to this stupendous tower; which, in
Fortywinks's humble opinion, " if he may be
considered to be in a position to assert it,"
shoots up like a rocket into a region of
beauty unknown to all other European or
Oriental towers. We walk round the fifty
feet of sharp close stuccoed brick, that form
one of its sides, and reach the lower guard-room,
where the curator resides. The curator
is a tight-jerkined man, with a great bunch
of keys at his girdle, like the jailer in a play.
His face is one of those dry, brown Spanish
faces, with eyes smouldering with quiet fire,
a surly mouth, and a slow articulation.
Evidently, if there is one thing he hates more
than another, it is going up those seventy
inclined planes to the bell-turret of the
Giralda. There is also an old crone, who
mumbles prayers to herself, and is rubbing,
with other purposes than Aladdin's, one of
those old Roman lamps that the Andalucian
peasantry and the poor people of Rome
still use. (It was just like those found at
Pompeii, and still used throughout Naples.
It went up in a square brass stalk, with a
base below to rest on, and a ring above for the
finger: half way down came the boat-shaped
oil chamber, with three spouts for wicks.)
Brushing the room with a bundle of peacocks'