the reader avoid the Church of Santa Maria
Mayor. It is so dark within that he will not see the finely carved choir
seats without the help of matches, or the pictures at all; but it is
worth realizing, as one presently may, that the hither part of the
church is a tolerably perfect mosque of Moorish architecture, through
which you must pass to the Renaissance temple of the Christian faith.

Near by is the Casa de Mondragon which he should as little miss if he
has any pleasure in houses with two _patios_ perching on the gardened
brink of a precipice and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys
in the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing up from it over the
face of the cliff. The garden is as charming as red geraniums and blue
cabbages can make a garden, and the house is fascinatingly quaint and
unutterably Spanish, with the inner _patio_ furnished in bright-colored
cushions and wicker chairs, and looked into by a brown wooden gallery. A
stately lemon-colored elderly woman followed us silently about, and the
whole place was pervaded by a smell that was impossible at the time and
now seems incredible.

III

I here hesitate before a little adventure which I would not make too
much of nor yet minify: it seems to me so gentle and winning. I had long
meant to buy a donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter beginning
to this end than by buying a donkey's head-stall in the country where
donkeys are more respected and more brilliantly accoutred than anywhere
else in the whole earth. When I ventured to suggest my notion, or call
it dream, to our young guide, he instantly imagined it in its full
beauty, and he led us directly to a shop in the principal street which
for the richness and variety of the coloring in its display might
have been a florist's shop. Donkeys' trappings in brilliant yellow,
vermillion, and magenta hung from the walls, and head-stalls, gorgeously
woven and embroidered, dangled from the roof. Among them and under them
the donkeys' harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, handsome
man with eyes that seemed the more prominent because of his close-shaven
head. We chose a headstall of such splendor that no heart could have
resisted it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which Spanish
donkeys wear on their noses for the protection of the public, our guide
expatiated upon us, and said, among other things to our credit, that we
were from America and were going to take the head-stall bac