Then, putting on a black montero cap, she archly
cocks it, and trifles with it, and finally places it
in the bend of the arm on which the flag was,
and goes through all the ceremonies of the bull-fight
—the flag and hat passing for her lover,
and she herself tossing and fretting with her
head to imitate the action of the bull. Now
she beats with her pretty feet or apes the
pawings of the king of the herds that chase
each other through clouds of dust in the low
earth-banks of the Guadalquivir. Then cap
and flag pass away, and she ends with the
oriental beating of hands and the low, monotonous
chant which is rude and simple yet
impressive.

We tear ourselves from the perpetual
motion, and with bows to the company and
Pepe Blanco, pass down the rude stairs out
into the street. What a contrast from the
hot glare and noise. How quiet! I can
hear the crickets discussing the price of
flour down in the baker's cellar on the other
side of the way. The image shop is shut;
the slippers and plaids and scarfs are all put
by for the night. The pedlar is gone from
the blind church door, where he used to sell
all day, castanets, old bottles, books, small-tooth
combs, knives, and worm-eaten flint
guns. There are no porters or Doloreses
round the tumbling fountain. The church
doors are shut, and the paradise smell of
incense, that puffs out all day far into the
street and into the market-place, is gone up
to heaven like an exhaled prayer. The
strings of mules no longer trip and clink and
patter and stumble over the slippery trottoir.
The band is hushed in the Square of the
Constitution, and the fuego (match) boys are
gone to their straw. The fierce Pagan-looking
herdsmen, with their long pike goads
and their strange rough sheep-skin jackets
and leather gamashes are not yet coming
into early market. The great pyramids of
pot-bellied and toad-speckled melons are
all eaten or rolled away. The great green
peppers and the terra-cotta-looking pomegranates
are hidden behind those gratings,
and so are the chumtos and the prickly
pear fruit. I see no one but a sturdy watch-man;
who, with a clear voice, calls out sereno
(fine) as if it was a cathedral response, and
he were minor canon. I observe he wears a
broad yellow leather baldrick, and has a
sheath on the spear blade from which his
lanthorn swings.

Rose, addressing "my gentlemens," bids
him look at a man eating iron. I ask him
what he means by such ostrich-diet, and he
tells me, pointing to a dark slim figure
clinging to the window-bars, that it is a
lover having a secret night interview with
his Juliet, his Lola, or his Katinka. He is
clinging like an angry parrot to the tall
window-irons, pouring his delicious temporary
insanity through the bars into her ear.
That gleam of white is she, and that distant
guitar that sounds so pleasantly up the quiet
street is some securer lover, serenading.
Why, if one choose to be fool enough to pick
quarrels, one might soon be, as Don Quixote
promised Sancho, up to one's elbows in adventures.
A finer city to get one's head
broken in, I never saw.

I pass the Alcazar, with its horseshoe-gate
tinge of Arab conquest and their conquering
cavalry. I tread the broad steps and terrace
round the cathedral where Shylocks and
Antonios once used to meet as on 'change,
cheered by whiifs of anthems and breaths of
incense; now, white and bleached in the
moon, it is lined with shadows of the great
chains and broken Roman temple-pillars
that fence it in. I steal a look through the
Moorish gateway—the old court of purification
where the orange-trees are all black
and silver with the moonlight and the shadow.
I pass under the great Giralda Tower, the
work of the pyramid-builders, its sharp
brickwork, its faded frescoes, now all silvered
out by the moonlight, and I reach the Fonda-Madrid.
A sleepy porter receives me with a
blessing, that sounds to me like an inverted
curse, and I jolt up to bed, fastening my
folding-doors with those long primitive bolts
peculiar to Spain. Rose I hear under the
balcony, expressing to the porter his doubts
as to whether I shall eventually give him
more, than twice as much as his proper
courier's hire per day.

I shuffle off my husk, my disguises, my
properties, and cunningly slip under the
green mosquito-curtains, leaving the little
winged monsters thirsting for my blood outside
the thin fence, like devils outside the
walls of Paradise.

A great dark curtain of cloud lifts up, and
I am in the fairy region of sleep. Hark!
here rises old Seville; and from the gilded
minaret comes the cry of the followers of
Mohammed, "Come to prayer—come to
prayer! Prayer is better than sleep—
prayer is better than sleep! "Floods of
white turbans roll by, in the midst, Yoosoof,
surrounded by his black eunuchs, with their
golden breastplates. Suddenly, the train
stops, and from a plumed litter a sultana, with
eyes of the gazelle, hails me. She says—

"Time to get up, my gentlemens!"

It was Rose. Seven o'clock? Why I have
not been asleep five minutes!

         BLACK, WHITE, AND WHITY-
                          BROWN.

FOR years have I sought him. From the
days when I started in all the hope and
freshness of youth, to the present hour, when
I am sick and feeble with age. I have cried
aloud for him until my voice is hoarse and
broken. I have looked for him until my
eyes are blind with eager watching. I have
listened for his footstep, to find but the echo
of that which I instinctively avoid. I have
consulted those who should have been my