moment's impunity from my bath of golden
fire, I feel a sort of enormous flat-iron lifted off
my heart, my blood runs warmer and quicker,
as if the tide had begun to turn, and my
whole body grown taller, stronger, and more
elastic. If a harlequin window had been
near, ten to one but I had gone through it.
I climbed up the sloping avenue, past the
sentinels, singing a verse of an old Spanish
love-song:

          "White feather of the fountain
               The June wind blows away,
           Tell me, has the sweet Dolores
               Pass'd this place to-day?
           I see her clue of rose-leaves scatter'd
               Leading past that three:
          Fair fountain with the silver stalk,
               Then farewell to thee."

As I sang this, I was passing the curious
little tea-garden summer-house tent, which
has been erected by one of the numerous
inns that in the summer time desecrate the
interior of the palace grounds. It was a
great square marquée, the roof all striped
pink and white, the interior looking very
much like one of those dinner booths,
musical with the pop of champagne corks,
which you see on the Epsom Downs on a
Derby day. There is no one in it now but
one or two sleeping waiters, who blink at me
as I pass, and a stray guide, who is seeking
whom he may devour, and longs, like a
starved locust in the desert, for some "green
thing" to stay his stomach. I pass the great
raw wooden cross, that Cardinal Mendoza
set up here when the city was taken from
the Moors; and begin thinking, in spite of
Syrian roses and those tufted palms with
snake-skin trunks, what a desert the unprotected
palace must have stood in before our
Duke—the Duke of Dukes—sent over this
elm wood—true British. I must have—

But what is that wild war-whoop—half
tallyho, half scalp-cry—that sounds to me
something like the Tyrolese "Tur-li-et-ty!"
that war cry of our modern civilisation, not
unheard in the—

I looked up and saw a kindly red face, and
a flaming scarlet uniform, hanging over the
balconied paling of one of the Alhambra
inns, with a tumbler of bitter beer frothed to
snow in his hand. It was Spanker, hearty
and boisterous as ever, beckoning me up to
his "coign of vantage." Behind him were
several other faces that I did not know.

The inn, which looked very much like an
inn at Twickenham or Fulham, had sneaked
in under the wing of one of the old ruined
towers of the Alhambra's outer fortitications,
which gave it an air of respectability, and
amused you by the contrast. A great hole
in the grey wall above our heads, the landlord
pointed out as the place where, during
some Spanish troubles, a gun had been run
out. It was indeed the very spot of the
appearance of the great Moorish giant in one
of Washington Irving's delightiul Spanish
legends of the old Moorish palace. It was, it
struck me directly (and I do not take any
peculiar credit tor the acumen) rather a
curious way (this of Spanker's) of examining
the beauties of the fairy house of pleasure—
but I said nothing. Every traveller has his
own sort of spectacles, I thought—yellow or
rose. Some use a magnifying glass: just
now a microscope is the rage. Spanker looks
at everything through a bitter-beer glass;
but not bitterly.

"Monsieur Spanker a beaucoup d'ésprit,
BEAUCOUP!" said a queer, thin, old fellow
with a white hat, who sat at the same round
table with us, and addressing himself to me.

"Shut up, Bensaken!" said Spanker, thinking
it necessary to stop the too palpable
flattery of his seedy adherent in the white
hat. "Capital beer, isn't it?"

"Bensaken!" said I, with a start, as the
grave man smiled grimly. "What, the famous
guide, without whom Fortywinks said it was
impossible to see Granada?"

"The very identical," said Spanker. "Ain't
you, Ben?"

Bensaken had evidently become prime
minister, guide, counsellor, and friend to
Spanker, and was laying out a little sort of
ground plan of half-dollars on the table, for
his patron to understand clearly what he had
to pay. All time saved from guiding us
Bensaken, the old gentleman of Moorish
extraction, evidently thought gained.

Bensaken's manner was highly characteristic
He was something between the old
travelled colonel whom you meet at the clubs,
and a faithful old English gamekeeper. His
dress was too seedy for the colonel; his hard,
grave bearing too dignified for the gamekeeper.
His face was the old soldier's; but
his legs were the legs of common life. This
moment he leant forward, astute and
sagacious as a Tallyrand to propose some plan of
baffling the greed of Spanish landlords; the
next he ran off, with all the humble servility
of the odd man at an hotel, to do our meanest
desires—hire us horses, or take places for us
at the bull-ring. "Stunning old fellow Ben,"
Spanker used to say, when we found him
sitting at the hotel door, waiting our return
for some expedition, his commission well
done, and all we needed anticipated. He
called us at preternatural hours, before the
hotel-waiters were up; checked and pruned
our bills, advised us on purchases, brought
us cold chickens and melons for our coach
journeys, rilled our wine-flasks, dragged us to
diligence offices an hour too soon, never
forgot the salt in a pic-nic parcel, asked a
mere trifle for his daily services; and when
we shook hands with him at parting almost
shed tears. "The faithful feudal old buffer,"
as Spanker exclaimed, watching him till
his old white hat faded out of sight. I
would have trusted faithful old Ben with
untold gold. Compared with guides in
general—half wolf, half parrot; their fathers