feathers of faded emerald and other jewel
colours, moves a brisk, black-eyed Immaculata,
or Juanna, giving furtive attention to a
handsome young muleteer lounging at the
door in the "promiscuous," desperately
accidental way peculiar to lovers. This
full-bosomed, agile girl, is the sister of the
celebrated Campinila, or Daughter of the
Giralda, at present the best public dancer
in Seville,—a pantheress at the Bolero, a
leopardess at the Cachuca, a snake in the
Fandango, and a flying angel in everything
else. A sort of superstition connects her
with this old Moorish-painted tower, as the
dream of Victor Hugo's does Esmeralda with
the twin towers of Notre Dame. She was
born in it; perhaps will come back a faded
old woman, tired of the pomps and gawds of
the world, to die in it, and be tolled for at
last by her old friend, the big bell La Gorda.,
which daily announces to the pious of Seville
the Angelus Domini and the Ave Maria— the
beginning and end of the religious man's day.

Up I go through several dark passages,
and small colt's-foot arches, and begin to
ascend the ramps, as the short inclined planes
are called, that, with the Moors, superseded
stairs. Every ramp is numbered just over
its entrance arch, and stands off at an acute
angle from its predecessor. We are going up
three hundred and fifty feet, as high as the
Campanile at Venice, up to the bronze figure
of Faith with the labarum banner that crowns
the highest summit, as it has done ever since
the wise monks put it there— two thousand
pounds of it, to shift with every breeze— in
fifteen hundred and sixty-eight.

At every fresh slope of ascent we pause,
to let the echo of our tramping feet die away,
and look down the giddy precipice height
through the simple Moorish window-loops
with the two colt's-hoof openings, clinging
by the central slender shaft of dark marble
or amber alabaster. It was from this
slender outer balcony, frail, but beautiful as
the open side-work of a lady's casket, that
the green-turbaned Cadi used, in his while
and crimson robes, to address the rolling,
troublous sea of turbans, when the silver
clarions, mentioned in the old Cid ballads,
had sounded, and the Atabal bell-staffs and
Moorish drums had beaten and jingled
noisily to order silence.

"By Jove," says Fortywinks, who always
speaks in a controversial way, " don't you
call this beautiful ? Talk of Bow Church!"

I hadn't said a word about Bow Church,
or its mean, tight little balcony hanging over
its stormy street. I hadn't denied the
beauty of the Tower of Prayer; nor the
sanctity of Justina and Rufina, the sainted
potter's daughters, whom Murillo painted
from live potter's daughters, and who are
supposed still miraculously to defend this tower:
being indeed seen as late as July, eighteen
hundred and forty-three, when they caught
some of Espartero's cannon-shot, just as an
Eton long-stop would catch a spinning cricket-ball.

Right— left—up, up— tramp, tramp—
tramp, tramp. There is no prospect to turn
and admire, as elderly gentlemen do when
they are blown going up hill, and want to
mop their foreheads; and I am not going to
stop at Fortywinks's desire—though I think
he wants to stop, for I hear him puffing and
panting like an over-walked poodle, just
turning 54 ramp: 57, 58, 59, 60: another
horseshoe window, giddier still to look down:
61, 62, 63. The curator goes sulkily on,
cursing his fortune, looking on himself as a
vexed, and personally ill-treated Spaniard.
"Bad enough," I think I hear him saying,
"to show the tiresome old tower, that seems
to me to grow higher every day, as I get
older—worrying enough, to show it, I say
again, to real Castillians, and the
'well-boiled ' Majo; but to foreigners, and, above
all, Englishmen—bah!" and he curses us in
the name of the false prophet and all his
gods, who helped the Moslem to build this
hateful tower.

All this time I, like Gallio, " caring for
none of these things," and knowing that,
English or not, he will pocket our shillings,
tramp up the stone slopes, thinking of the
outside of the fair tower, with its circled
pillarets and the rope net-work of quatre-foiled
and pierced tracery encircling its
precious surface. Far behind, I hear Fortywinks,
groaning, and calling out, " I say,
old fellow, how much more of it? " and
"Isn't it a way up?" I think of the figured
shadows that play and wanton about its
dark-eyed loops. I think of the fading frescoes,
with their dim red and yellow saints,
fading off, as if really the intense blood-and-bone
Mohammedanism of the building were
too much for them. I think of the running
scrolls of thorny flower-leaves that twine
round the spandrils of the window arches,
that from below look so small,—mere
swallows' nests of shady balconies up against
the great brick world of a tower. Fortywinks,
at last catching me, insists on reading
from his red Guide-book, " as how " the
tower was a Mueddin, or a Prayer Tower, for
the old mosque that stood below. It was
built in eleven hundred and ninety-six, in
our early Norman kings' days, by Aboo
Joseph Jacob, who added it as a crown to the
great mosque his father had built, in imitation
of the forest of pillars, one at Cordova
still existing. The father was the wise
Sultan who threw a bridge of boats across
the muddy river, who completed the walling
of the city, repaired the old Roman aqueduct,
and built wharves for the Moorish Sevillians.
Jaber, a Moorish architect built it, as well
as sister edifices at Morocco and Rabat: built
them to be nearer Heaven, to worship Allah,
and observe the stars, in the year of the
Hegira, five hundred and ninety-three (eleven
hundred and ninety-six). On the summit he