ple were there to dispute our afternoon's
ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls and the
men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as strangers;
and I am often there still with no sense of molestation. Even the reader
who does not conceive of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than
fountains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and walls of
clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay
me there.

The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with
association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where
my own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but
otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph
itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love
so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October.
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was
enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails
in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look
out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of
course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife's past, but we
really did not care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. had
doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand
of Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations
until they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they
withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors. The arms
of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere
from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains;
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but
otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini
who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but
there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about
in tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes
before the keeper's door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of
fire-red peppers.

This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife,
but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and
many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the