s few. Some ladies in
private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public
ones as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in
the horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their
hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray. No
ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her
nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but
men of every class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind
of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese:
flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.

I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in
the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that
I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my
way through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his
most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of
the man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my
struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate
of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much
labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I
came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to
untangle a little the web that the French and the Aragonese wove in
the conquest and reconquest of the wretched Sicilies; but how was I
to imagine in the Connecticut Western Reserve the scene of Gonsalvo's
victories in Calabria? Even loath Ferdinand the Catholic said they
brought greater glory to his crown than his own conquest of Granada; I
dare say I took some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy of Naples,
and I may have been indignant at his recall and then his retirement from
court by the jealous king. But my present knowledge of these facts, and
of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in 1500, as well as his
exploits as commander of a Spanish armada against the Turks is a
recent debt I owe to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and not to my boyish
researches. Of like actuality is my debt to Mr. Calvert's _Southern
Spain,_ where he quotes the accounting which the Great Captain gave
on the greedy king's demand fo