And here in this armory is the very sword that Gonzalo, of Cordova, wore, and the sword with which Ferdinand, the saint and hero, smote the Moors; and the sword of Charles V., and the complete suit of armor which the great emperor often wore, and in which he was painted by Titian; and the suit of armor worn by Boabdil, the last Moorish king who sat on the throne in this Alhambra, and who left it behind, doubtless, when he delivered his sword into the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella, at the foot of the hill on which I am writing. We had thought revolvers a modern invention, but here are elegant pistols, on the same principle, used in the seventeenth century, and now as good as new. A crown, a sword, a helmet, or something else, illustrates the life of all the heroes of Spanish history; and the number of warlike memorials here displayed is about three thousand. How men managed to fight while clad from head to foot in these suits of steel armor is to me, a non-combatant, one of the mysteries of the art of war. We read of tournaments, and—more to be wondered at—of battle-fields, where all the knights are clothed from head to foot in the identical garments that are now before us, or in others made after the same pattern; and how, with such a weight of steel and so constrained in the freedom of action, they could manage to wield their swords and thrust their spears, I do not understand. They were not men of more physical power than our soldiers. Some of them were less than the present average size of men. But they were mighty men with the sword. The Toledo blade was quite equal to that of Damascus; and the helmet was often insufficient to save the brain, when the sword, in a strong hand, came down, cleaving through steel and skull.