The Hall of the Ambassadors probably never looked very different from what it is now. It was never a private apartment. We can imagine it occupied, when no function was proceeding, by a few slaves dozing on mats or reclining dog-like on the richly carpeted floor, ready, however, to spring up and make the lowest of salaams as some bearded dignity entered. [Illustration: GRANADA--THE COURT OF THE LIONS: MOONLIGHT] This splendid hall and the other apartments adjacent to the Court of the Myrtles are supposed (I know not on what authority) to have constituted the official or public part of the royal residence, together with the apartments demolished to make room for the Palace of Charles V. The rest of the building, on this supposition, was the private or harem quarter. A narrow passage leads from the Court of the Myrtles to the Court of the Lions. "There is no part of the edifice that gives us a more complete idea of its original beauty and magnificence than this," says Washington Irving, "for none has suffered so little from the ravages of time. In the centre stands the fountain famous in song and story. The alabaster basins still shed their diamond drops; and the twelve lions which support them cast forth their crystal streams as in the days of Boabdil. [The fountain nowadays plays only once a year.] The architecture, like that of all other parts of the palace, is characterized by elegance rather than grandeur; bespeaking a delicate and a graceful taste, and a disposition to indolent enjoyment. When one looks upon the fairy tracery of the peristyles, and the apparently fragile fretwork of the walls, it is difficult to believe that so much has survived the wear and tear of centuries, the shocks of earthquakes, the violence of war, and the quiet though no less baneful pilferings of the tasteful traveller; it is almost sufficient to excuse the popular tradition that the whole is protected by a magic charm." I fancy that the gifted American was himself responsible for that tradition, for the Spaniards, as Lady Louisa Tenison observed sixty odd years ago, are not an imaginative race, and whatever legends or traditions are current relate almost exclusively to the Virgin and saints. Spanish folk-lore knows nothing of fairies and goblins. The palace which Irving tells us the people regarded as enchanted had been used by them for years as a factory, as store-rooms, as a laundry, as a caravanserai. This hardly suggests that it was looked upon with superstitious awe. The truth is that the palace had enchanted Washington Irving, as it has done many others--not natives--since.