The Tagus then, as now, was always the great natural charm of the town. Like the Arno, it takes on every hue; some mornings just after dawn, it is the palest blue, again is a still sleepy jade, or silver like a curled mirror, and as stirless as it gives back the ardent flash of the sunrays; or after sunset, when all the rich hues have faded from sky and earth, and crimson and russet gold have waved into an indigo dusk, you will see a white mist rise and travel in flakes from the bosom of the enazured water over the dim landscape. Capricious as these cold or fervent hours may be, the permanent colour of the tranquil untravelled Tagus is yellow. All poets and writers see but the yellow in it, as in the Tiber, though its blue and green and silvered hours are much more beautiful. "Del dorado Tago ausente," sings the old _Romancero General_, as far back as 1605, and continues to describe Toledo above her golden river: "Dize ay cristal del Tago Que con murmurio entre arenas Vais regando amenos sotos de Agradable primavera. [Illustration: THE TAGUS] Hasto do bates los muros de aquella cuidad soberbio, tans alebrada en el mundo Por tu artífio y nobleza. Que entre peñas levantada de inexpugnable firmeza, Y de torres coronada compitos con las estrellas. Y luego vañas los prados de tu elana y ancha vega, Que de ninfas adornada es nueva gloria en la tierra." The most witching element in the enchantment of this river is its stillness, its unfathomable, unbroken quietude. In the sixteenth century it was navigable as far as Toledo, but the mills upon its banks are now for ever silent; no traffic has deflowered its legendary charms; neither boat nor barge cuts a way along its inactive waters. In an age when every resource of nature is feverishly applied to the service of commerce or luxury, there is something majestic in such uselessness. When the wherry that plies sleepily from bank to bank floats into view, the sight is a positive shock to artistic sensibilities. It seems an idle desecration. Only the gold-seekers--symbol of eternal illusion, ever nourished and ever elusive to the grasp of man, who builds fresh illusions of the ashes of past deceptions--may continue to trouble its wild untamed depths. So from time to time these children of tradition, believing in the tale of its golden sands, go down to the reedy banks, after an inundation, with sifters, and industriously gather up the sand the river has flung from its bottom. They pour water over it, shake it well, and then hungrily examine the grains that remain in the vain hope of finding gold. Before Ponz's time the dean of the Church of the Infantas was said to possess a piece of gold cast up by the Tagus, and the complaint then was that many another piece had been carelessly broken and scattered by the silversmiths. But Ponz doubts the golden legend even so early as the last century. To explain the undoubted fact