urra!_' The first donkey
walked slowly on, and as they heard the tinkling of the leader's bell
the rest stepped forward in the long line, their heads hanging down,
with that hopeless movement of the feet.

* * *

In the night, wandering at random through the streets, their silent
whiteness filled me again with that intoxicating sensation of the
_Arabian Nights_. I looked through the iron gateways as I passed, into
the _patios_ with their dark foliage, and once I heard the melancholy
twang of a guitar. I was sure that in one of those houses the three
princesses had thrown off their disguise and sat radiant in queenly
beauty, their raven tresses falling in a hundred plaits over their
shoulders, their fingers stained with henna and their long eyelashes
darkened with kohl. But alas! though I lost my way I found them not.

Yet many an amorous Spaniard, too passionate to be admitted within his
mistress' house, stood at her window. This method of philandering,
surely most conducive to the ideal, is variously known as _comer
hierro_, to eat iron, and _pelar la pava_, to pluck the turkey. One
imagines that the cold air of a winter's night must render the most
ardent lover platonic. It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels
if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are
invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby. So it is
doubtless wise to separate true love by iron bars, and perchance
beauty's eyes flash more darkly to the gallant standing without the
gate; illusions, the magic flower of passion, arise more willingly. But
in Spain the blood of youth is very hot, love laughs at most restraints
and notwithstanding these precautions, often enough there is a
catastrophe. The Spaniard, who will seduce any girl he can, is pitiless
under like circumstances to his own womenkind; so there is much weeping,
the girl is turned out of doors and falls readily into the hands of the
procuress. In the brothels of Seville or of Madrid she finds at least a
roof and bread to eat; and the fickle swain goes his way rejoicing.

I found myself at last near the _Puerta del Puente_, and I stood again
on the Moorish bridge. The town was still and mysterious in the night,
and the moon shone down on the water with a hard and brilliant coldness.
The three trees with their bare branches looked yet more slender, naked
and alone, like pre-Raphaelite trees in a landscape of _Pelleas et
Melisande_; the broad river, al