The Alcazar is a Moorish palace of great beauty, with walls and ceilings all covered with intricate patterns of carving and bright colours, so that it was like coming to live in a palace of the Arabian Nights. The inner courtyards are Oriental, cooled by fountains. The garden around the palace is Oriental, in tiny squares and flower-beds, with short paths, and no place for one to run. And around the garden the high wall is Oriental, a true harem wall, over which one could not see. In all the rooms of the palace there is not one door; and when we had hangings put up in the Moorish arches of our bedroom doorways the servants were surprised. They did not understand the desire for privacy. Sentinels and guards were on duty everywhere; a man even walked all night under my bedroom windows; and whenever we went into the gardens the trumpets were sounded--Heaven only knows why! It was a life in which there was nothing to do, nothing to see--a life designed for Southern women who are content to loll about on cushions and grow fat. We were not expected to go out at all, except in carriages, with an escort, down staring streets, and, indeed, it would have been impossible to walk through the crowds that gathered. I could not ride horseback without a lady-in-waiting to go with me; and all the ladies were too fat to ride, even if they had known how. The best exercise I could get in the garden was to jump the flower-beds--to the amazement of everybody--or to skip up and down in one place mechanically. It was as much worse than the Escurial as the Escurial had been worse than the Palais de Castile; and when it came home to me that this, now, was to be my life for ever, I felt that I should go mad. Every afternoon my mother gave audiences to the ladies of Sevilla; but what good was that? Even with us children they did nothing but curtsy, and kiss the hands, and look at us, awed, as if we were not human. They could not say anything to us, and we did not know what to say to them. Generals came to salute my mother, and remained for dinner; and every day one officer of the guard had luncheon with us; but we girls were not allowed to speak to men, except to exchange formal words of greeting under the eyes of the governess. One day, the governess being absent, I got into conversation with an officer at the table, innocently, when he had been speaking about “the bath of Maria Padilla” in our garden. It was a large stone bath that had been built by Pedro the Cruel for this Maria [Illustration: GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE]