s were dead, men and women, or were
_mudexares_, vassals, or were fled, men and women, all who could flee,
to their kindred in Africa. Or they yet cowered, men and women, in the
broken garden, awaiting individual disaster. The Kingdom of Granada had
sins, and the Kingdom of Castile, and the Kingdom of Leon. The Moor was
stained, and the Spaniard, the Moslem and the Christian and the Jew. Who
had stains the least or the most God knew--and it was a poor inquiry.
Seek the virtues and bind them with love, each in each!

If the mountain road had been largely solitary, it was not so of this
road. There were folk enough in the wide Vega of Granada. Clearly, as
though the one party had been dressed in black and the other in red,
they divided into vanquished and victor. Bit by bit, now through years,
all these towns and villages, all these fertile fields and bosky places,
rich and singing, had left the hand of the Moor for the hand of the
Spaniard.

In all this part of his old kingdom the Moor lay low in defeat. In had
swarmed the Christian and with the Christian the Jew, though now the Jew
must leave. The city of Granada was not yet surrendered, and the Queen
and King held all soldiery that they might at Santa Fe, built as it were
in a night before Granada walls. Yet there seemed at large bands enough,
licentious and loud, the scum of soldiery. Ere I reached the village
that I now saw before me I had met two such bands, I wondered, and then
wondered at my own wonder.

The chief house of the village was become an inn. Two long tables stood
in the patio where no fountain now flowed nor orange trees grew nor
birds sang in corners nor fine awning kept away the glare. Twenty of
these wild and base fighting men crowded one table, eating and drinking,
clamorous and spouting oaths. At the other table sat together at an end
three men whom by a number of tokens might be robbers of the mountains.
They sat quiet, indifferent to the noise, talking low among themselves
in a tongue of their own, kin enough to the soldiery not to fear them.
The opposite end of the long table was given to a group to which I now
joined myself. Here sat two Franciscan friars, and a man who seemed a
lawyer; and one who had the air of the sea and turned out to be master
of a Levantine; and a brisk, talkative, important person, a Catalan, and
as it presently appeared alcalde once of a so-so village; and a young,
unhealthy-looking man in black with an open book bes