perhaps more so than those ruins in Egypt and Greece and Rome that have the hoar of more centuries upon them. It is not so strange, nor so mournful, that the columns and walls should now be in the dust that did their duty two, three thousand years ago. It seems to be almost becoming that the temples of old paganism should moulder in the dispensation of faith that worships in spirit only. But it is painfully suggestive of the transient nature of all human art and power that these massive structures with gorgeous decorations, whose splendor is only equalled by the fancies of romance, have had their rise, their reign, and their ruin all within the lapse of the last ten hundred years. Antonio Aguilo ’y Fuster, Conseije del Palacio Arabe, Alhambra, gave me his card, as we entered a small door in the side of a plain wall, and were informed that we were now in the palace of the Moors, the veritable Alhambra itself! The important personage whose card was in my hand was the guardian of this mysterious realm, and would, for the usual consideration of a dollar to him paid, introduce us to the several apartments. The contract was concluded, and the porter led the way. He brought us first into the Court of Myrtles. It is a vast open oblong, 170 feet by 74, with a lake in the centre, surrounded by a marble pavement and myrtle-trees, from which it takes its name. In this lake the wives of the Moorish monarch bathed, of course secluded from all eyes but his own, and the eunuchs, whose “sentry boxes” still remain. Light and beautiful columns, with graceful arches springing from the capitals, support a gallery on all sides. Out of this court open many rooms, whose floors and walls and ceilings, with their inscriptions, their delicate tracery work, not worth the name of sculpture, but beautiful as perishable, are the types of the race that revelled here in the beginning of the fourteenth century. Right here Mohammed III. had his head cut off, and his body was pitched into the water where the usurper king Nasr often enjoyed the luxury of a bath with his wives.