to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left
it hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the
crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade
cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the
white walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so
jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through
the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with
a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic
wall of King Wamba's time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost
his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and
from the borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover the gray
garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She said she was three _duros_
and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had
a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.

V

It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had
begun by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for
centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day
the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the
street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug
through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in
the church. We expressed our doubt of the man's knowing so unerringly
that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. "If you can believe
the rest I think you can believe that," our guide argued.

[Illustration: 15 AN ANCIENT CORNER OF THE CITY]

He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had
a pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry
to exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we
brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting,
and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have
learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house
of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in
a flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred
thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its
decay, but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the
households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which
the _patio_ and the subterranean damp from the