mill of stone,
forming a strikingly picturesque object, in its shattered condition,
amid the foaming rapids.

We visited a museum of antiquities, but it was in a dark, inappropriate
building, gloomy and cobwebby, smothered in dust and obscurity; so out
of the way, indeed, that it was difficult to find, and our guide was
obliged to inquire where the institution was! The traveler may
conscientiously omit a visit to the blind alley which contains the
Museum of Antiquities at Cordova. The guide, by the way, we found much
more intent upon selling us Spanish lace than anxious to impart
desirable local information. To be a good guide, as Izaak Walton says of
anglers and poets, a man must be born so.

The one great and nearly unrivaled interest of Cordova is its
cathedral, an architectural wonder, erected some sixteen centuries
since, and hallowed by age and historical associations. Beautiful are
its still remaining thousand and one interior supporting columns,
composed of porphyry, jasper, granite, alabaster, verd-antique, and
marble of various colors. Think of that vandal Charles V. destroying two
hundred of them: he who was capable of tearing down a portion of the
Alhambra to make room for his barrack of a palace! Each of the columns
upholds a small pilaster, and between them is a horse-shoe arch, no two
columns being precisely alike,--as they came from Greece, Rome,
Constantinople, Damascus, Africa, and some are said to have come from
the Temple at Jerusalem, as also from Paestum and Cumae. All the then
known world was put under contribution to furnish this wonderful temple.
The great mosque was changed into a cathedral after the expulsion of the
Arabs; but a large portion of the interior is untouched, and remains as
it was when the caliphs worshiped here. We felt oppressed by a sensation
of gloom wandering amid the dark forest of pillars. It is, and always
will be, a mosque, as characteristic and typical as the most marked
shrine in the East. The Holy of Holies, as sacred to the Spanish
Arabians as Mecca to those of the East, has been preserved intact, and
is by far the most interesting portion of the structure. Here all the
original lace-like ornamentation is entirely undisturbed, and looks as
though it were a hall taken bodily out of the Alhambra. The Moslem
pilgrims from far and near came to this spot, and walked seven times
round it, the marble pavement being visibly worn by the bare knees of
devout Mussulmans.

Ju