, until I saw its towers
In every cloud that hid the setting sun."

George H. Boker.

Seville, _November_ 10, 1852.

I left Gibraltar on the evening of the 6th, in the steamer Iberia. The
passage to Cadiz was made in nine hours, and we came to anchor in the
harbor before day-break. It was a cheerful picture that the rising sun
presented to us. The long white front of the city, facing the East, glowed
with a bright rosy lustre, on a ground of the clearest blue. The tongue of
land on which Cadiz stands is low, but the houses are lifted by the heavy
sea-wall which encompasses them. The main-land consists of a range of low
but graceful hills, while in the south-east the mountains of Ronda rise at
some distance. I went immediately on shore, where my carpet-bag was seized
upon by a boy, with the rich brown complexion of one Murillo's beggars,
who trudged off with it to the gate. After some little detention there, I
was conducted to a long, deserted, barn-like building, where I waited half
an hour before the proper officer came. When the latter had taken his
private toll of my contraband cigars, the brown imp conducted me to
Blanco's English Hotel, a neat and comfortable house on the Alameda.

Cadiz is soon seen. Notwithstanding its venerable age of three thousand
years--having been founded by Hercules, who figures on its
coat-of-arms--it is purely a commercial city, and has neither antiquities,
nor historic associations that interest any but Englishmen. It is
compactly built, and covers a smaller space than accords with my ideas of
its former splendor. I first walked around the sea-ramparts, enjoying the
glorious look-off over the blue waters. The city is almost insulated, the
triple line of fortifications on the land side being of but trifling
length. A rocky ledge stretches out into the sea from the northern point,
and at its extremity rises the massive light-house tower, 170 feet high.
The walls toward the sea were covered with companies of idle anglers,
fishing with cane rods of enormous length. On the open, waste spaces
between the bastions, boys had spread their limed cords to catch singing
birds, with chirping decoys placed here and there in wicker cages. Numbers
of boatmen and peasants, in their brown jackets, studded with tags and
bugles, and those round black caps which resemble smashed bandboxes,
loitered about the walls or lounged on the grass in the sun.

Except along the Alameda, which fronts the bay,