Our first care was to request a cicerone to take us to a _casa de pupilos_,--that is, a private house in which boarders are received, for, as it was our intention to remain some time at Granada, the mediocre hospitality of the _Fonda del Comercio_ was far from calculated to promote our comfort during a long sojourn. This _cicerone_, of the name of Louis, was a Frenchman, and came from Farmoutiers in Brie. He had deserted during the French invasion under Bonaparte, and had lived at Granada for twenty years. He was the most comical figure imaginable: his height--he was five feet eight--contrasted most singularly with his little head, which was as wrinkled as a shrivelled apple and about as large as your fist. Being deprived of all communication with France, he had preserved his Brie jargon in all its native purity, spoke like an Opéra Comique Jeannot, and seemed to be perpetually reciting the words of Monsieur Etienne. In spite of so long a sojourn, his thick head had refused to stock itself with a single new idiom: he was hardly acquainted with the most indispensable phrases. The only things Spanish he had about him were the _alpargatas_, and the little Andalusian hat with its turned-up brim. The fact, however, of being Spanish even to this extent sorely vexed him, and he revenged himself by showering on every Spaniard he met all sorts of injurious epithets--in his Brie jargon, be it understood, for Master Louis had a particular dread of hard blows, and took as much care of his skin as if it had been worth something. He took us to a very respectable house, in the _Calle de Parragas_, near the _Plazuela de San Antonio_, and at a stone's throw from the _Carrera del Darro_. The mistress of this boarding-house had lived for a long time at Marseilles and spoke French, which circumstance immediately induced us to take up our abode there, as our vocabulary was still very limited. They put us into a room on the ground floor: this room was whitewashed, and its entire furniture consisted of a rose of different colours in the middle of the ceiling, but then it had the advantage of opening into a _patio_, surrounded by white marble columns with Moorish capitals, procured, no doubt, at the demolition of some ancient Arabian palace. A little basin, with a jet of water in it, dug in the middle of the court, kept the whole place cool; an immense piece of esparto matting, which formed the _tendido_, let in a subdued light, and made the ground, paved and marked out into compartments with pebbles, glitter here and there, as if studded with shining stars.