he never failed to send a formal excuse to the prior, and to require from his confessor an account of what had been preached or read. The rest of the afternoon he sometimes whiled away in the workshop of Turriano, and in the construction of pieces of mechanism, especially clocks, of which more than a hundred were said, in one rather improbable account, to tick in the emperor's apartments, and reckon to a fraction the hours of his retired leisure. Sometimes he fed his pet birds, which appear to have taken the place of the stately wolf-hounds that followed at his heel in the days when he sat to Titian; or a stroll amongst his fruit-trees and flowers filled up the time to vespers and supper. At the lower end of the garden, approached by a closely shaded path, there may still be seen the ruins of a little summer-house, closely enbowered, and looking out upon the woodlands of the Vera. Beyond this limit the emperor rarely extended his excursions, which were always made, slowly and painfully, on foot; for the first time that he mounted his pony he was seized with a violent giddiness, and almost fell into the arms of his attendants. Such was the last appearance, in the saddle, of the accomplished cavalier, of whom his troopers used to say, that had he not been born a king, he would have been the prince of light-horsemen, and whose seat and hand excited at Calais gate the admiration of the English knights fresh from the tournays-- "Where England vied with France in pride On the famous field of gold." Music, which had been one of the chief pleasures of his secular life, continued to solace and cheer him to the last. In the conduct of the organ and the choir he took the greatest interest, and through the window which opened from his bedchamber upon the high altar, his voice might often be heard accompanying the chant of the friars. His ear never failed to detect a wrong note, and the mouth whence it came; and he would frequently mutter the name of the offender, with the addition of "_hideputa bermejo_," or some other epithet which savored rather of the soldier than the saint. Guerrero, a chapel-master of Seville, having presented him with his book of masses and motets, he caused one of the former to be performed before him. When it was ended, he remarked to his confessor that Guerrero was a cunning thief; and going over the piece, he pointed out the plagiarisms with which it abounded, and named the composers whose works had suffered pillage.