It would be tedious to read, if I had patience to describe, the many courts and halls and baths, saloons and chambers, the galleries leading to them, the little gardens where the sun looks kindly down upon a few plants and flowers, and to tell you of the thousand-and-one tales with which so many of these towers and chambers have been made historic. Murder has followed close on the heels of jealousy, in all ages, and under a system that makes intrigue and lust the great amusement of life, the history of the harem has always been a story of suspicion and blood. [Illustration: PORTION OF A DOOR.] Bensaken is _the_ guide to the Alhambra. Others are willing to lead you through the labyrinth, and will talk to you as they go, in a mixture of Spanish, Italian, French, and English, with a dash of Arabic, which they have picked up from the translations of inscriptions on the walls; but they are all ignorant fellows, who live by the ignorance of those to whom they tell their stories. Now Bensaken is an Englishman, born in Gibraltar, and has lived to be seventy years old in Spain; has been through all these years adding to his knowledge of the country, its history and its condition, especially all that relates to the Moors, Granada, and the Alhambra, until he has grown into a walking cyclopedia of Spanish lore. And this learning of his he guards so cautiously that when other guides and interpreters, with travellers so unhappy as to have fallen into their hands, would come near to us while our learned Bensaken was discoursing to us of the wonderful mysteries of the Alhambra, its legends and its uses, he would suddenly pause in his interesting narrations, and begging pardon for his silence, would wait until they had passed beyond hearing; for, said our veracious and most agreeable Bensaken, “I cannot afford to let them fellows know what I have been learning all these years of my life, I have forgot enough to set all of them up in business.” “Did you know our countryman, Washington Irving, when he was here?” I inquired. “Oh yes, and a nice, worthy gentleman he was: so kind, so pleasant always; but he did not keep very closely to the facts: to tell you the truth, those are very beautiful stories of Mr. Irving, but the most of them are all in your eye, sir.” “He speaks of the good people who lived here when he lodged in the Alhambra, and a fair maiden to whom he gave the name of Dolores, and a noble young man, Molina, or something like that; what ever became of them, can you tell me?”