Bensaken gave a low little laugh, and said that Dolores was a coarse and dowdy drudge, whom the warm imagination of the author had invested with purely rhetorical charms, and the other occupants of the palace had no claims to distinction. One of them whom he mentioned was murdered in a street brawl, and the whole family had passed into oblivion. Yet their names will live in the stories of the Alhambra while the genial and smoothly flowing pages of Irving are read as the pleasantest and most _reliable_ account of the traditions of this wondrous pile. We went down into the garden of the Queen’s prison, and on a little patch of green we stood while Bensaken pointed to the gallery where she was permitted to walk and take the air and enjoy the sunlight, but the various chambers to which she was restricted had no exit. This was not very close confinement, to be sure, but it becomes intolerable, even the luxury of a palace, with a flower garden in its court, and gorgeous hangings and gilded ceilings and marvellous sculptures, if the royal lodger is a prisoner, and hopes for no exit but through the gate that opens in the tomb. And then we visited the “Hall of Two Sisters,” so fancifully named because of two immense marble slabs, which form a part of the pavement. The decorations of this apartment are exceedingly beautiful. The stalactite roof is said to consist of 5,000 pieces, and though all this plaster ornamentation is supported only by reeds, it remains almost unbroken as it was when first put up. These were the private apartments of the wives and slaves of the Sultan, and were furnished with couches and divans, and the walls are covered with love poems, in the glowing language of the East, celebrating the sensual delights of these voluptuaries of the harem. All that architecture and upholstery, poetry and taste could supply for the embellishment of chambers of pleasure, were lavished with wasteful profusion here, or, to use the more familiar terms of our Western phraseology, “they were got up regardless of expense.”