Keeping along the southern base of the Guadarrama Mountains, whose snowy summits and gray, rock-strewn sides wore a wild, lonely aspect that was inexpressibly melancholy, we came at length to a lower plateau that advances like a promontory between two broad valleys opening to the north and south. On this eminence stands the picturesque city of Avila, the Pearl of Old Castile, very much as it was in the twelfth century. It is full of historic mansions and interesting old churches that have a solemn architectural grandeur. One is astonished to find so small a place inland, inactive, and with no apparent source of wealth, with so many imposing and interesting monuments. They are all massive and severe, because built in an heroic age that disdained all that was light and unsubstantial. It is a city of granite――not of the softer hues that take a polish like marble, but of cold blue granite, severe and invincible as the steel-clad knights who built it. The granite houses are built with a solidity that would withstand many a hard assault; the granite churches, with their frowning battlements, have the aspect of fortresses; and the granite convents with their high granite walls look indeed like “citadels of prayer.” Everything speaks of a bygone age, an age of conflict and chivalrous deeds, when the city must have been far more wealthy and powerful than now, to have erected such solid edifices. We are not in the least surprised to hear it was originally founded by Hercules himself, or one of the forty of that name to whom so many of the cities of Spain are attributed. Avila is worthy of being counted among his labors. But whoever founded Avila, it afterwards became the seat of a Roman colony which is mentioned by Ptolemy. It has always been of strategic importance, being at the entrance to the Guadarrama Mountains and the Castiles. When Roderick, the last of the Goths, brought destruction on the land by his folly, Avila was one of the first places seized by the Moors. This was in 714. After being repeatedly taken and lost, Don Sancho of Castile finally took it in 992, and the Moors never regained possession of it. But there were not Christians enough to repeople it, and it remained desolate eighty-nine years. St. Ferdinand found it uninhabited when he came from the conquest of Seville. Alonso VI. finally commissioned his son-in-law, Count Raymond of Burgundy, to rebuild and fortify it.