LIV. Spanish Swords; Royal Armoury, Madrid 258 LV. Spanish Sword; Royal Armoury, Madrid 262 LVI. Spanish Sword 266 LVII. Spanish Swords; Royal Armoury, Madrid 270 LVIII. Sword Marks 272 LIX. _Bridona_ Saddle; Royal Armoury, Madrid 274 LX. Hanging _Jaeces_ for Horses 278 LXI. Travelling Litter attributed to Charles the Fifth; Royal Armoury, Madrid 282 GOLD, SILVER, AND JEWEL WORK The hyperbolic language of the ancients spoke of Spain as filled throughout, upon her surface and beneath her soil, with precious stones and precious metals. Old writers--Strabo, Pliny, Aristoteles, Pomponius Mela, and Diodorus Siculus--declare that once upon a time a mountain fire, lighted by shepherds in the Pyrenees and fanned into a conflagration by the wind, heated the earth until the ore within her entrails came bubbling to the top and ran away in rivulets of molten gold and silver, spreading all over Spain. The indigens of Lusitania as they dug their fields were said to strike their implements on nuggets half a pound in weight. The heart of the Peninsula, between the B[oe]tis and the Annas rivers--that is, the country of the Oretani and the Bastitani--was fabled to abound in mines of gold. The traders from Ph[oe]nicia, we are told, discovered silver to be so abundant with the Turdetani that "the vilest utensils of this people were composed thereof, even to their barrels and their pots." Accordingly these shrewd Ph[oe]nicians, offering worthless trinkets in exchange, loaded their ships with silver to the water's edge, and even, when their cargo was complete, fashioned their chains and anchors of the residue. In spite of their extravagance, upon the whole these legends are not utterly devoid of truth. "Tradition," said so careful an authority as Symonds, "when not positively disproved should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders insubstantial." So with the legends of the gold and silver treasure of the old-time Spaniards. Besides, it seems unquestionable that those fanciful assertions had their origin in fact. Spain stood upon the western border of the ancient world. Year in, year out, the sanguine sun went seething down into the waters at her western marge. Mariners from distant countries viewed those sunsets and associated them with Spain herself. Thus, hereabouts in the unclouded south, would gold and silver be suggested by the solar orb; or emerald and jacinth, pearl and amethyst and ruby, by the matchless colours of the seldom-failing sunset.