e little house full of memorials and the little garden full
of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me-nots, were entirely
delightful. As every one but I knew, and even I now know, he was born a
Greek with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he
found his account in a manner of his own, making long noses and long
chins and high narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in
the excess of his manner. The house has been restored by the Marquis de
la Vega, according to his notion of an old Spanish house, and has the
pleasantest small _patio_ in the world, looked down into from a carved
wooden gallery, with a pavement of red tiles interset with Moorish tiles
of divers colors. There are interesting pictures everywhere, and on one
wall the certificate of the owner's membership in the Hispanic Society
of America, which made me feel at home because it was signed with the
name of an American friend of mine, who is repressed by prosperity from
being known as a poet and one of the first Spanish scholars of any time.

The whole place is endearingly homelike and so genuinely hospitable that
we almost sat down to luncheon in the kitchen with the young Spanish
king who had lunched with the Marquis there a few weeks before. There
was a veranda outside where we could linger till the rain held up,
and look into the garden where the flowers ought to have been
forget-me-nots, but were as usual mostly marigolds and zinnias. They
crowded round tile-edged pools, and other flowers bloomed in pots on the
coping of the garden-seats built up of thin tiles carved on their edges
to an inward curve. It is strongly believed that there are several
stories under the house, and the Marquis is going some day to dig them
up or out to the last one where the original Jewish owner of the house
is supposed to have hid his treasure. In the mean time we could look
across the low wall that belted the garden in, to a vacant ground a
little way off where some boys were playing with a wagon they had
made. They had made it out of an oblong box, with wheels so rudely and
imperfectly rounded, that they wabbled fearfully and at times gave way
under the body; just as they did with the wagons that the boys I knew
seventy years ago used to make.

I became so engrossed in the spectacle, so essentially a part of the
drama, that I did not make due account of some particulars of the
subterranean six stories of El Greco's house. There must