The palace, or what was once a palace, crowns the summit of the hill on which the old city of Toledo stands. Around the base of the rock below the Tagus rushes rapidly, and away in every direction stretches the wide plain, gloomy, desolate, and yet grand in its storied past. It is not certain that the Moorish, still less certain that the Gothic kings preceding them, had their royal residence on this bleak height. But the Catholic kings for centuries held their courts on this spot, and the prints of their hands are visible everywhere. The porter who opened the door for us is a model of a Spanish official. Too proud to be a door-keeper, and, with nothing else to do, he would impress even a stranger with the idea that he was born with a higher destiny than to tend a gate. It was a pleasure to him, evidently, to tell us we must not go here, nor there, nor anywhere, except where it was of no use to go; and the scanty information he was willing to impart was extracted with difficulty, and worth nothing then. We stood in the midst of a spacious square, the patio, or court, and on its four sides rose the walls of the ancient palace. Charles V. and Philip II. rebuilt the most of it on the ruins holding some of the apartments that date as far back as Alonzo X.; and in modern times the hoof of the war demon has trodden the stairways and galleries and gorgeous halls, until what with English and French soldiery, and some of other nations more barbarous still, the Alcazar of Toledo is a more comfortable residence for bats and owls than kings and fair princesses. Two or three proud peacocks were strutting in the warm sunshine of the patio, displaying their gaudy plumes and arching their graceful necks, reminding us of other beauties who had often gone blazing through these doors, with radiant jewels and shining robes, yet, in all their glory, were not arrayed like one of these. This patio shows, on its four sides, two rows of galleries, one over the other, supported each of them by thirty arches, with columns crowned with Corinthian capitals, embellished with the arms of the many kingdoms that Charles V. had conquered. A staircase, designed by Philip II. while he was in England, and built under orders sent by him while there, leads up to the royal apartments, long since deserted, and now worth seeing only because they were once the home of men and women whose names are part of the history of the world. An English gentleman said to me in the rail-car in Spain one day, “I should be glad to have you tell me what it is that impresses you the most in coming from America and travelling in Europe.” I answered that it required some time to make a fitting reply to so great an inquiry. “Well,” he said, “will you take fifteen minutes to think, and then give me the result?” I replied, “I am ready to answer now: what impresses me more than all else is, that these old countries, having been what they once were, are _what I find them now_.”