The interior of these ancient houses is no less interesting. One, to which we were invited, was said to be the best example of the Moorish domestic architecture extant in Cordova. A few jasper columns were standing under the archway by which we passed from the court. The modern whitewash had covered the most of the arabesque embellishments upon the walls. We ascended a flight of broad, brick steps, with a solid beam of wood at the outer edge of each step, and at the head of the stairs the venerable master of the house met us kindly and made us welcome. We heard a piano as we were coming up the steps, but it suddenly ceased, and a young lady flitted out of view. The house is said to be more than a thousand years old. It may be so, but the Moorish style is so imprinted on the tastes of the people that they build age after age with substantially the same models, and it is not safe to affirm that the hands of the Moors laid any of these stones. The ceilings are very low, the rooms small, the furniture, as in all lands, is according to the taste or means of the owner, but Eastern in its style, and adapted to the quiet, languid type of the modern as well as the ancient inhabitants of this and all such climes. The wonder of Cordova is also one of the wonders of the world. Its cathedral has been a mosque of the Moors. To see it once is an adequate reward for all one has endured in travelling thus far through the most comfortless country in Europe. To see it often, and study it in the minute details of its extraordinary plan and finish, is to lay up a store of imagery for dreams of memory through the rest of a lifetime. At least so it seems to me now, since entering its magnificent Gate of Pardon, and suddenly standing in the midst of a thousand variously colored columns,—marble, jasper, porphyry, granite,—all surmounted by Corinthian capitals, a forest in a temple, a petrified grove of trunks of majestic trees, enclosed in walls. Perhaps the memory of it will fade, so that a year or two hence the impressions of wonder, of sublimity, of vastness, will not be so strong as they are now. But at the moment when the interior first broke upon my sight, it was as strange to me that the art of men _could_ construct such an edifice, as that the great Architect _should_ build the walls over which the Niagara rushes for ever. [Illustration: COURT OF ORANGES, CORDOVA.]