Our first glimpse of the soft-flowing Guadalquivir was a disappointment――a turbid stream between two flat, uninteresting banks, on which grew low bushes that had neither grace nor dignity. It needed its musical name and poetic associations to give it any claim on the attention. But it assumed a better aspect as we went on. Immense orchards of olive-trees, soft and silvery, spread wide their boughs as far as the eye could see. The low hills were sun-bathed; the valleys were fertile; mountains appeared in the distance, severe and jagged as only Spanish mountains know how to be, to give character to the landscape. Now and then some old town came in sight on a swell of ground, with an imposing gray church or Moorish-looking tower. At length we came to fair Seville, standing amid orange and citron groves, on the very banks of the Guadalquivir, with numerous towers that were once minarets, and, chief among them, the beautiful, rose-flushed Giralda, warm in the sunset light, rising like a stately palm-tree among gleaming white houses. The city looked worthy of its fame as Seville the enchantress――_Encantadora Sevilla_! We went to the _Fonda Europa_, a Spanish-looking hotel with a _patio_ in the centre, where played a fountain amid odorous trees and shrubs, and lamps, already lighted, hung along the arcades, in which were numerous guests sauntering about, and picturesque beggars, grouped around a pillar, singing some old ditty in a recitative way to the sound of their instruments. Our room was just above, where we were speedily lulled to sleep by their melancholy airs, in a fashion not unworthy of one’s first night in poetic Andalusia. What more, indeed, could one ask for than an orange-perfumed court with a splashing fountain, lamps gleaming among the trailing vines, Spanish _caballeros_ pacing the shadowy arcades, and wild-looking beggars making sad music on the harp and guitar? Of course our first visit in the morning was to the famed cathedral. Everything was charmingly novel in the streets to our new-world eyes――the gay shops of the _Calle de las Sierpes_, the Broadway of Seville, which no carriage is allowed to enter; the _Plaza_, with its orange-trees and graceful arcades; and the dazzling white houses, with their Moorish balconies and pretty courts, of which we caught glimpses through the iron gratings, fresh and clean, with plants set around the cooling fountain, where the family assembled in the evening for music and conversation.