The scene of the ball is generally placed in the suburb Triana, which is the Transtevere of the town, and the home of bull-fighters, smugglers, picturesque rogues, and Egyptians, whose women are the premières danseuses on these occasions, in which men never take a part. The house selected is usually one of those semi-Moorish abodes and perfect pictures, where rags, poverty, and ruin, are mixed up with marble columns, figs, fountains and grapes; the party assembles in some stately saloon, whose gilded Arab roof--safe from the spoiler--hangs over whitewashed walls, and the few wooden benches on which the chaperons and invited are seated, among whom quantity is rather preferred to quality; nor would the company or costume perhaps be admissible at the Mansion-house; but here the past triumphs over the present; the dance which is closely analogous to the _Ghowasee_ of the Egyptians, and the _Nautch_ of the Hindoos, is called the _Ole_ by Spaniards, the _Romalis_ by their gipsies; the soul and essence of it consists in the expression of certain sentiment, one not indeed of a very sentimental or correct character. The ladies, who seem to have no bones, resolve the problem of perpetual motion, their feet having comparatively a sinecure, as the whole person performs a pantomime, and trembles like an aspen leaf; the flexible form and Terpsichore figure of a young Andalucian girl--be she gipsy or not--is said by the learned, to have been designed by nature as the fit frame for her voluptuous imagination. [Sidenote: OPERA IN SPAIN.]