and imprison. I met slaves in those Iong bare
whitewashed corridors, who reminded me of
the creatures in Dante's Inferno. All wore
that unchanging wan look of suffering and of a
pain that never slept. All seemed to be suffering
for some horrid and unutterable crime,
and to bear about a flame at their heart
and brain. They all had that dreadful stare of
wild, unchanging, concentrated watchfulness
that shows no love nor humanity lingers in
the heart. Halfway up-stairs I saw a haggard
creature, with hungry-looking dry hair,
huddled in a heap on the stone landing, and
clinging to an open grating that looked into
the court-yard, clinging with one bare foot
thrust through the liars like a new-caught
bird longing and pining for liberty and air.
He never turned to look at us: but his foot
paddled about in the free air, and liberty was
his only thought. His name, the keeper told
us carelessly, was José Prado, and he believed
himself to be Boabdil the Sultan of Granada,
unjustly detained in prison by the cruel
Spaniards.

Then mounting higher, we were taken into
a small room to see Lopez de Mallara, a mad
painter. He was at his easel when we
entered, and took no notice of us, except
by a smile, which lit his sad, worn, and
tormented face. The walls are covered with
sketches of Saint Luke, the painter's Saint,
who, the keeper said, Mallara believed
always present, praising and criticising his
work. It was vanity and success drove
Mallara mad. He is always trying to paint a
landscape of chaos, and the ghost of a flea;
every day, when he finishes, he rubs out his
sketch of these two difficult subjects. He
was now working with gravity at a picture of
Moses striking the Rock; a subject Murillo
painted, and one purely national and Spanish;
for thirst is an institution of this petrified
country. The canvas was certainly cut
curiously into two exact parts by a straight
palm-tree; but that is eccentricity; and the
tree did not look much out of place. No more
were the open-mouthed Israelites, running
about in their striped hoods and Arab-looking
robes, clamouring about the miracle, which
was tearing down the back of the picture:
like a young Niagara: no more were the
women, falling on their knees, either to clasp
their dying little ones in their arms, or to
fall on their faces and thank God for their
deliverance. But suddenly I started involuntarily,
as I came upon a spot in the picture
which marked the palpable insanity of the
painter, whose brush, as I look more curiously,
works on so pleased and busily. Yes, there
was one leprous spot of insanity, terrible to
discover, as the boil on the arm-pits, that
was the sign of the great plague. There,
quietly huddled in a corner, like an
afterthought, were two naked Israelitish boys,
one of them chattering with his teeth and
shaking his fist angrily at the other, who was
tossing over him a cupful of the miraculous
water. Well, up to this even, the picture
was reasonably rational; but here madness
broke out. The splashed liquid was not water,
but diamond dust, quicksilver, or some boiling
or fermenting silvery metal, which rushed
about the boy in shiny metallic globules.

"Pepé Lopez," said the keeper, in an under
voice, "murdered his father three years ago
in Virgin Mary Street, just by the Alhambra
Gate. He believes he will be sent by Saint
Luke, when he is one hundred and one years
old, to paint landscapes in the moon, as
scenes for the Seville Opera House."

Then I passed through the women's ward,
where certain full-necked, coarse-looking
women (many of them murderesses) were
pacing up and down unceasingly, with that
feverish tiger-prowl peculiar to insanity. One
was mad from vanity, another from love,
another from religion. Only one woman
stopped to look at us, and to give a sort of
crazy laugh at the novelty of the
interruption.

As I went out through the last ward, I
stopped for a moment to notice a cluster of
old men huddled round a stove, warming and
circling their thin, shrunk hands. One of
them suddenly fixing his eyes with insane
and horrible fixity on me, muttered a wish
that he could pass his knife through me; whom
he had been so long waiting for. "That," said
the keeper, "is an old guerilla, who
committed horrible crimes and cruelties against
the French. Nothing will induce him to
mention any particulars of his past life.
Sometimes he will crawl out to the grating
to beg tobacco of visitors, otherwise he never
speaks."

Only yesterday snow was lying like whitewash
on the roofs, and turning the hackney-coaches
into the semblance of large wedding-cakes;
painting even the lamp-posts white,
and crusting white the window glass. It
warms me this cold day, when the feather
snow is waltzing and circling in the brown
London air, to think of the fiery walk I had
up the hill to the Alhambra, where I was to
meet Spanker. How glad I was to pass
through the horse-shoe gateway, where the
gilt crescents once passed out to scare the
Christians, and get under the green roof of
those tall wisps of elms, that dreamily
reminded me of England and English parks,
and green solitudes, where the only sound is
the soft brooding cooing of the mother wood
dove. I strolled up, enjoying the exemption
from the heat, and the warmth, without the
scorch, of the external sun; not one of whose
fiery shafis could get at me, but fell, blunted
and hopeless, from the broad emerald shield
that arched over my head.

There are two days of a married life, a
wicked old writer says, that are perfectly
happy; the first day and the last day. The
happiest hours of my life have been the lulls
after a corn has been extracted or a tooth
drawn. I rejoice on the mere strength of a