If you wish to change the scene, roam through the plazas, with their marble water-basins and orange-trees; go to the Duke de Montpensier's garden, with its wealth of myrtles and fern palms; wander to the river-side and look at the ships lading or unlading; or ascend the Giralda, the old mosque steeple from which the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and take in the comely mass of colour beneath in one broad sweep. Then the changing sky that canopies this "fragment of heaven let fall upon earth!" The riot of clouds when the elements war, and after the midday heats the genial rain pours down as if the blue expanse overheard were a lake--how fervent and cordial! At night, when the city streets are crowded with groups in conversation; when the fragrant, flower-garlanded patios are visible by mystic lights pendent from gilt chandeliers, like votive lamps before a shrine; when caballeros pay court to their lady-loves through gratings as caballeros are licensed only to pay court in Spain; when plaintive songs, with a reminiscence of the desert about them, are chanted in monotonous cadence to the accompaniment of a guitar--how grateful it all is to him who is not lost to the sense of poetry! Imperceptibly one yields himself to the associations of the bygone, and imagination takes wing. As the night ages and silence enwraps the scene--a silence only broken by the deep boom from a clock-tower or the voice of the sereno, the Spanish watchman, hobbling along with his lantern swinging from his pike and his bunch of keys from his girdle, singing out the hours--the effect is stronger; and I confess, while roaming in such a frame once, I so lost myself to the present that I should not have been surprised if I had met the Knight of La Mancha and the three gallants of the _Canard à Trois Becs_ in mocking whispers at his heels, or Figaro himself on a serenading excursion; but with the last puff of my cigar died out the ideal and returned the real. I hastened back to my hotel, which might once have been a Moorish palace, and there, to make the assurance doubly sure that this was the nineteenth century, sat in an American rocking-chair a gentleman in a tweed suit, reading _Galignani's Messenger_ and drinking pale ale. That gentleman was not a poet; he was an English tourist. It was the period before the Holy Week, with its world-renowned solemnities, celebrated with a pomp second only to that of Rome in her heyday, and drawing strangers in swarms from every point of the compass. If I expected to enjoy an intellectual chat with that gentleman I was mistaken. "Only fancy!" he began; "the landlord has been here, and the beggar says we'll have to pay double for board and lodging if we don't clear out before the 5th of April."