ilent as the spectators
who grouped themselves about her or put their heads out of the windows
to see, as well as hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I would
tell the reader. The injured party, and I am sure she must have been
deeply injured, showered her enemy with reproaches, and each time when
she had emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of her hands in
the wrong-doer's face she went away a few yards and filled them up again
and then returned for a fresh discharge. It was perfectly like a scene
of Goldoni and like many a passage of real life in his native city, and
I was rapt in it across fifty years to the Venice I used to know. But
the difference in Seville was that there was actively only one combatant
in the strife, and the witnesses took no more part in it than the
passive resistant.

VI

As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so wholly violent
but that it was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the
foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of the
houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesiastics
somehow related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not
far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva's palace was so
narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, and we should
never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he had not politely pushed
the side of his pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we did
get to the Casa de los Venerables we found it mildly yellow-washed and
as beautifully serene and sweet as the house of venerable men should be.
Its distinction in a world of _patios_ was a _patio_ where the central
fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and encircled
by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill
their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other merits, but
the fine staircase that ended under a baroque dome left us facing a
bolted door, so that we had to guess at those attractions, which I leave
the reader to imagine in turn.

I have kept the unique wonder of Seville waiting too long already for
my recognition, though in its eight hundred years it should have learned
patience enough for worse things. From its great antiquity alone, if
from nothing else, it is plain that the Giralda at Seville could not
have been studied from the tower of the Madison Square Garden in New
York, which the American will recall when he