_Transitions of Decay_.--I have often observed that the more proudly a mansion has been tenanted in the day of its prosperity, the humbler are its inhabitants in the day of its decline, and that the palace of the king, commonly ends in being the nestling place of the beggar. _A Factotum_.--A portly old fellow with a bottle nose, who goes about in a rusty garb with a cocked hat of oil-skin and a red cockade. He is one of the legitimate sons of the Alhambra, and has lived here all his life, filling various offices; such as deputy alguazil, sexton of the parochial church, and marker of a fives-court established at the foot of one of the towers. He is as poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged, boasting of his descent from the illustrious house of Aguilar, from which sprang Gonsalvo of Cordova, the grand captain. Nay, he actually bears the name of Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in the history of the conquest. It is a whimsical caprice of fortune to present, in the grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and descendant of the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry, leading an almost mendicant existence about this once haughty fortress, which his ancestor aided to reduce: yet such might have been the lot of the descendants of Agamemnon and Achilles, had they lingered about the ruins of Troy. * * * * * MANNERS & CUSTOMS OF ALL NATIONS. * * * * * ORIGIN OF EPSOM RACES. (_Concluded from page 331._) "At this period[7] there were many capital thorough bred horses in England, the most celebrated of which were the famed Arabians Darley and Godolphin, from which the best horses have been traced for nearly a century. They produced stock of vast size, bone and substance; and were, at the same time, endowed with such extraordinary, and before unheard of, powers of speed, as to render it probable that some of them have reached nature's goal, or ultimate point of perfection. [7] About the fifteenth year of the reign of George II. "From the former of these horses descended Flying Childers. He is said to have never run a race, except at Newmarket, where he beat, with ease, the best horses of his time. "In October, 1722, he beat Lord Drogheda's Chaunter, each carrying ten stone, over a six mile course, for 1,000 guineas. At six years of age, he ran a race, carrying 9 stone 2lbs. against Almanzor and Brown Betty, over the round course at Newmarket, three miles six furlongs, and ninety-three yards, in six minutes and forty seconds! to perform which, he must have moved eighty-two feet and a half in a second of time, or at the rate of nearly one mile in a minute. "This is the greatest speed yet known of a horse, many have approached, but not equalled it.