in Greek letters: _The King who opens this cave and discovers the wonders it holds, will discover good and evil_. Those who preceded him into the mysterious palace speedily fell back in a state of shuddering alarm and fear, shouting that they had seen an awful vision. Instead of staying to learn the nature of the vision, Rodrigo, angry and impatient, pushed his way in before his cowardly followers. He encountered an immense bronze statue in a beautiful frame work, highly sculptured. It held a wooden hammer, and struck fierce blows with it against the earth, thus moving the air and causing a terrible noise which bewildered and frightened Rodrigo's courtiers. It stopped its movements as Rodrigo approached, and on the wall of a closed arch beside it was written: _Whoever opens this arch will find wonders_. The King ordered his men to break open a passage, and instead of the treasures he expected to find, there was a picture of Arabian troops, some afoot, some on horseback, turbaned and armed, and underneath written: _Whoever reaches this spot and opens this arch, will lose Spain, and will be beaten by this race_. "The King," writes Lozano, "with sorrow in his heart and such sadness as we can understand, though carefully hiding it, ordered the door to be closed again." All those present also dissimulated their feelings, not to increase the affliction of the King. And while they went about seeking if among so many misfortunes they might find some consolation, lifting their eyes, they saw on the wall, on the left hand of the statue, other lines of writing: _Sorry King for thy doom hast thou entered here_. And on the right lines saying: _For foreign nations wilt thou be dispossessed, and thy people will be heavily punished_. Behind the statue they read: _I call upon the Moors_, and on its breast was written: _I fulfil my task_. That same night in the roar of many voices and loud battle cries, the earth opened and swallowed up in a clap of thunder the enchanted palace and every vestige of it. The legend is an excellent one, and has well served the poets, but unhappily it is only a legend of no historic value whatever. Rodrigo no more penetrated this mythical cave than he kissed Florinda, who never existed. Cardinal Siliceo is said to have explored what remained of the part without the vanished enchanted part of the palace, and after penetrating half a league inward, found bronze statues on the altar; and while examining one of them, the statue fixed him with a grave and austere glance, while a loud noise was heard, which filled the explorers with terror, and Lozano naïvely suggests that nothing of the sort possibly happened, for fear is a great inventor, and "they were filled with fear to the eyes." They fled without King Rodrigo's courage to go further. Though it was summer time, most of them died immediately afterwards from cold and fright, and the "good" archbishop, who had caused this devastation among