m, for the short time we kept
our windows shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised
ourselves a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we
needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread of
popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the way,
there proved to be a school of the "Royal Society of Friends of their
Country," as the Spanish inscription in its front proclaimed; and
at dusk its pupils, children and young people of both sexes, began
clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten o'clock they burst from
them again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly
after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market
wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their
succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a
moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near
by that clashed out: "Hello! Here's a bit of silence; let's knock it on
the head!"

We went promptly the next day to the gentle old manager and told him
that he had been deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet
street, and appealed to his invention for something, for anything,
different. His invention had probably never been put to such stress
before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we
subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our
search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have
the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family
living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we
were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we
then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was
not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling
how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked
our roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however,
we thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,
and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.

Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic
chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was
so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock
in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked al