The beggars of Cordova were the most importunate that fate sent across my path in the whole of Spain. I found it impossible to sit in the streets where I would gladly have planted my easel, and it was only by standing with my back to the wall that I was able to make my sketch of the Campanario. These streets are tortuous and narrow, and the houses, built on the Moorish plan with a beautiful _patio_ inside, are low. At many a corner I came across marble columns, some with Roman inscriptions, probably from Italica, placed against the house to prevent undue wear and tear. In the narrowest ways I noticed how the load borne by the patient ass had scooped out a regular track on either wall about three or four feet from the ground. Wherever I went, to the oldest quarters of the town in the south-east corner or the modern in the north-west, I could never rid myself of the feeling that Cordova was a city of the past. Her life is more Eastern than that of Seville, and her people bear more traces of the Moor. Decay and ruin are apparent at every turn, but how picturesque it all is!--the rags, the squalor, and the ruin. How I anathematised those beggars with no legs, or minus arms, when I tried to begin a street sketch! The patience of Job would not have helped me, it was the loathsomeness of these cripples that drove me away. Begging is prohibited in Seville and Madrid and in one or two other towns, would that it were so in Cordova. Away up in the southern slopes of the Sierra de Cordoba stands the Convento de San Jerónimo, now a lunatic asylum. Built out of the ruins of the once magnificent Medînat-az-zahrâ, the Palace that Abderrhaman III. erected, its situation is perfect. In the old days this palace surpassed all others in the wonders of its art and luxury. The plough still turns up ornaments of rare workmanship, but like so many things in Spain its glories have departed. Yes, Cordova has seen its grandest days, the birthplace of Seneca, Lucan, Averroes, Juan de Mena--the Spanish Chaucer--Morales, and many another who became famous, can now boast at best with regard to human celebrities as being the Government establishment for breaking in horses for the cavalry. Certainly the men employed in this are fine dashing specimens of humanity, and they wear a very picturesque dress. But Cordova like her world-famed sons, sleeps--and who can say that it would be better now if her sleep were broken? [Illustration: CORDOVA. FOUNTAIN IN THE COURT OF ORANGES] GRANADA Spread out on the edge of a fertile plain at the base of the Sierra Nevada, Granada basks in the sun; and though the wind blows cold with an icy nip from the snows of the highest peaks in Spain, I cannot but think that this, the last stronghold of the Moors, is the most ideal situation of any place I have been in.