to some maiden lurking within. The
nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides,
they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose
for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national
courtship going on at another casement, but that was at night, and
here the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o'clock in the
morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover stationed outside the shutter
with which the iron bars forbade him the closest contact; and it is
only fair to say that he minded nobody; he was there when we went in
and there when we came out, and it appears that when it is a question
of love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United
States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot
always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at least, the lover
did not seem to miss the moon.

He was only an incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me
revert from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them
on any pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves in the
gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The
first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our patriotic
Granadan guide, who had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, but
coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He smoked incessant
cigarettes, and he showed us especially the pavilion of Charles the
Fifth, whom, after that use of all English-speaking Spanish guides,
he called Charley Fift. It appeared that the great emperor used this
pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could not always have
meditated there, though the frame of a brazier standing in the center
intimated that it was tempered for reflection. The first day we found
a small bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved wooden
ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into
the sun. Another day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that
cried; on another, still more distractingly, a fashionable young
French bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an
archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time, Charley
probably had the place more to himself, though even then his thoughts
could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what he had
vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to take the worst of Spain with
him into the Netherlands, w