I cannot think of anything more nobly
beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she
has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab
and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only
from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession
beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to
welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of
Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers;
and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching
or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had
some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose
from the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish
dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish
palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated
behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its
pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem
power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and
it was these that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana
bridge.

VII

We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were
especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes
with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.
Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit
the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would
willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty
squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually
to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile
potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of
one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly
and vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was
beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner;
his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto's,
but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency
with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled
round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my
prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our
course. Le