h light and many flowers. The
effect produced by the sudden contrast between the joyless street and
the sunny garden, whose existence was never dreamt of, is delightful and
never to be forgotten; from Theophile Gautier, who had been in Northern
Africa, land of Mohammedan harems, it wrung the piquant exclamation:
"The Moors have been here!"

Every stick, stone, mound, house, lantern, and what not has its legend.
In this humble _posada_, Cervantes, whose ancestral castle is on yonder
bluff overlooking the Tago, wrote his "_Ilustre Fregona_." The family
history of yonder fortress-palace inspired Zorilla's romantic pen, and a
thousand and one other objects recall the past,--the past that is
Toledo's present and doubtless will have to be her future.

Gone are the days when Tolaitola was a peerless jewel, for which Moors
and Christians fought, until at last the Believers of the True Faith
drove back the Arabs who fled southward from whence they had emerged.
Long closed are also the famous smithies, where swords--Tolesian blades
they were then called--were hammered so supple that they could bend like
a watchspring, so strong they could cleave an anvil, and so sharp they
could cut an eiderdown pillow in twain without displacing a feather.

Distant, moreover, are the nights of _capa y espada_ and of miracles
wrought by the Virgin; dwindled away to a meagre shadow is the princely
magnificence of the primate prelates of all the Spains, of those
spiritual princes who neither asked the Pope's advice nor received
orders from St. Peter at Rome. Besides, of the two hundred thousand
souls proud to be called sons of Toledo in the days of Charles-Quint,
but seventeen thousand inhabitants remain to-day to guard the nation's
great city-museum, unsullied as yet by progress and modern civilization,
by immense advertisements and those other necessities of daily life in
other climes.

The city's history explains the mixture of architectural styles and the
bizarre modifications introduced in Gothic, Byzantine, or Arab
structures.

Legends accuse Toledo of having been mysteriously founded long before
the birth of Rome on her seven hills. To us, however, it first appears
in history as a Roman stronghold, capital of one of Hispania's
provinces.

St. James, as has been seen, roamed across this peninsula; he came to
Toledo. So delighted was he with the site and the people--saith the
tradition--that he ordained that the city on the Tago should