ty, it gave us one particular tree in a garden
almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing
to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot
tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made
up of "patines of bright gold." Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it
darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it
in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning
we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,

Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.

IV

But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a romantic novelist.
Many other trees in and about Granada were yellower than that one, and
the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we left our
hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such as travelers use when they
do not want some wonder of the world to escape them. Of course there was
really no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow
a match to light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to
smoke. He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could
speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying,
with a wave of his cigarette, "_N'est ce pas?"_ For the rest he helped
himself out willingly with my small Spanish. At the end he would have
delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the
palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did
not repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next
day.

Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely
enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly
elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds
sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was
somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to
get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay
basking and dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient reader
that the whole Alhambra, by which he must understand a citadel, and
almost a city, since it could, if it never did, hold twenty thousand
people within its walls, is only historically and not artistically more
Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful
than its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun
by Charles V., after a des