The barbarous death of Doña Urraca de Osorrio at this time has become historical. When Don Pedro learned that her husband, Alvarez de Guzman (the son of Guzman el Bueno, who saved Spain from the Moors at the siege of Tarifa), had gone over to his brother in the siege of Toledo, he caused her to be seized and burnt alive in the public square of Seville before the Ayuntamiento. Her maid, Leonora Davilo, was with her. As the wind was high at the time, Doña Urraca’s clothes were displaced, and her body exposed to the jeers of the brutal Sevillianos, when the faithful Leonora leaped into the flames, and casting herself as a veil on her mistress was burned with her. Thus they are both represented on Doña Urraca’s monument in the church of San Isidoro at Santa Ponce, a short distance from Seville, built by Guzman el Bueno, with little idea that his own daughter-in-law would be interred there under circumstances of such horror. And now the great name of Albuquerque is heard for the last time. Faithful to the cause of Don Enrique as he had been to that of Don Pedro, he met his former master, at his particular request, at the ancient town of Toro, lying in the open expanse of plains between Salamanca and Zamora, in order to endeavour to negotiate better terms for his new master. Of what passed between Don Pedro and his great minister there is no record, but the sudden death of Albuquerque immediately after the interview is not without suspicion of foul play. * * * * * The southern district of Spain, within the bounds of Andalusia, extending from Seville to Cadiz, is still a mystery as in days of yore. Great open alluvial plains, utterly treeless, stretch into boundless perspectives, the home of the wild bull in its pristine ferocity. The Guadalquivir flows onwards in a torpid tide among canals and open trenches down to the sea, a most unpoetic river in all but the name. All is grey, misty, and desolate, a “no man’s land,” to which even the waves of the Mediterranean bring no delight, for the shallow beach sends back the water so far it barely covers the sandy shore. On these shores the old Continent of Europe seems to die out, to make place for the youthful splendour of Africa opposite, visible in the line of the picturesque Atlas range rising across the straits; old Europe worn out, and melting into the sea before the defiance of its stalwart rival. Xeres de la Frontiera is the only town on this low marshy coast. The Xeres of that day--not famed for wine and commerce as in our time--was a small fortified place taken from the Moors, enclosed by walls; and precisely because the Xeres of that day was desolate and lonely, it was selected for the place of the queen’s imprisonment.