"I like to live in Granada,
It pleases me so well
When I am falling asleep at night
To hear the Vela bell."
There is the proud young mother, too, whom we came upon by chance over behind the Tower of the Princesses, where her pot of puchero was bubbling above a miniature bonfire, while the velvet-eyed baby boy sucked his thumb in joyous expectation. She often made us welcome, after that, to her home,—a dingy stone kitchen and bedroom, unfurnished save for pallet, a few cooking-utensils, a chest or two, and, fastened to the wall, a gaudy print of La Virgen de las Angustias, the venerated Patrona of Granada. But this wretched abode, the remains of what may once have been a palace, opened on a lordly pleasure-garden with walls inlaid with patterns of rainbow tiles, whose broken edges were hidden by rose bushes. There were pedestals and even fragments of images in this wild Eden, jets of sparkling water and walks of variegated marble. In the course of the month, English and Spanish callers climbed the hill to us and encompassed us with kindness, but we still maintained our incorrigible taste for low society and used to hold informal receptions on sunny benches for all the tatterdemalions within sight. Swarthy boys, wearied with much loafing, would thriftily lay aside their cigarettes to favor us with conversation, asking many questions about America, for whose recent action they gallantly declined to hold us responsible. "It was not the ladies that made the war," said these modern cavaliers of the Alhambra.
Their especial spokesman was a shambling orphan lad of some fifteen summers, with shrewd and merry eyes. Nothing pleased him better than to give an ornamental hitch to the shabby, bright-colored scarf about his thin, brown throat, and proceed to expound the political situation.
"You admire the Alhambra? I suppose you have no palaces in America because your Government is a republic. That is a very good thing. Our Government is the worst possible. All the loss falls on the poor. All the gain goes to the rich. But there are few rich in Spain. America is the richest country of all the world. When America fought us it was as a rich man, fed and clothed, fighting a poor man weak from famine. And the rich man took from the poor man all that he had. Spain has nothing left—nothing."
"Oh, don't say that! Spain has the Alhambra, and beautiful churches, beautiful pictures."
"Can one eat churches and pictures, my lady?"
"And a fertile soil. What country outblooms Andalusia?"