CHAPTER XI 



Seville, Feb. 21, 1852. 

 We have just come in from a midnight ramble through 

 the streets, with vistas, and clair-obscures, and shady angles, 

 and salient corners, and arches, and columns, and twinkling 

 lights, and serenaders with tinkling guitars, and senoritas 

 robed in white, waving cambric kerchiefs from balconies, 

 and watchmen crying, " Ave Maria puriiiiisimaaaaaa," to 

 a narrow strip of stars peeping down between the leaning 

 eaves. 



We are to start now in a day or two, having got our 

 beasts of burden. Mine I bought of a baker, a good trade 

 to buy a horse from ! Why ? — He is likely to be the 

 better bred. I cannot describe him now, but I dare say I 

 shall have plenty to say about him on the road. He is a 

 charming, vicious little black beauty, and the livery-man, 

 who has the charge of him, says he is a " demonio " in 

 the stable. 



Harry has got a more peaceable chestnut ; both seem 

 good and sound. During these our last days in Seville, the 

 population has been in a hubbub of rejoicing for the queen's 

 happy delivery from her physicians and priest ; it cannot be 

 ascertained from which she ran the greater risk, since her 

 constitution (can it be a Spanish one ?) has weathered both. 

 As a humane way of rejoicing for the queen's escape, 

 there was, among other things, a bull-fight ; and, like 



III 



