ured door we walked into a tiny tiled patio open to the sky,
too small and insignificant for a fountain or an orange-tree: the kitchen
and one other room where servants could sleep opened out of it, lighted
only by their wide doors, which were never shut. So much for the ground
floor.

A tiny tiled staircase led to the first floor. Four narrow rooms,
windowless, flanked the four sides of the square, and looked down into
the little court below. Each room had double doors standing open for
light and air. From the house-top above the first floor, on to which we
went last, there was at least a view of a thousand flat white roofs, of
pencil-shaped minarets, of turtle-backed mosques; but at the same time
the sun itself could not be more dazzling to look at than was the
impossible whitewash which besmeared all the roofs, and we soon left for
our first floor, in whose four little dark rooms we proposed to live.
Standing on the gallery which ran outside them, and leaning on the
balustrade looking down into the minute patio, it was a case of the view
below into that, and the view above up at the sky, and no more--a
limited, and on wet days gloomy, prospect. Added to that, the orgies
worked in the kitchen by a Moorish cook could not do other than proclaim
themselves all over the first floor. True, the little patio embodied the
Moorish conception of _al-fresco_ seclusion, and a depth of shadow lay in
the inner rooms within the thin shell of the white walls. And yet--and
yet--the lines of old-fashioned Eliza Cook returned insistently, and
refused to be silenced:--

Double the labour of my task,
Lessen my poor and scanty fare,
But give, oh! give me what I ask--
The sunlight and the mountain air.

And in the end the vote was given against the little windowless dwelling
in the Moorish Quarter. No doubt a courtyard house is bizarre, but it has
its imperfections.

A Scotch proverb has it that "Where twa are seeking, they are sure to
find." In time we found. A certain Moor of Tetuan, named Ali Slowee, a
Spanish protected subject, was guardian, uncle, and stepfather to a boy
named Dolero. Dolero owned a garden-house outside the city, called
_Jinan Dolero_ (The Garden of Dolero). Ali Slowee heard of our wants and
offered us his nephew's house, provided we undertook to give it up at the
end of March. Than the unexpected, when it does come, nothing is so good.
After a little difference over the rent (our landlord began by