should not be admitted."

At this moment the musicians finished up with a crash. The sound was
horrible. H. C. made an excruciating grimace and our captain shook with
laughter.

"Do you call that music?" we asked.

"_I_ do not," he returned, "because I have spent much time in Paris,
where barbaric music would not be tolerated. But these frantic discords
just please the people of Lerida, who have not been educated to anything
better. It is over for the night, and now everyone will depart. They
have drunk their coffee or wine or spirit, sat a whole evening in a
clouded, heated atmosphere, listening enraptured to the strains which
have set you quivering, and are going home feeling that if this or
paradise were offered to them they would not hesitate to reject
paradise. Such is their life."

We got up to depart also.

"I am sorry that I can be of no use to you," said our polite captain;
"but if you are leaving Lerida to-morrow, time certainly runs short. I
can, however, give you my card, and place myself and all I have at your
disposal. If ever you visit Lerida again, and I am quartered here, I
hope you will find me out. I will at least promise you a pass into the
fortress; and there are a few things you would not be likely to see
without the open sesame of one of ourselves."

Upon which he shook hands, gave us a military salute, "wrapped his
martial cloak about him," and passed out into the night.

We listened to his quick receding footsteps and then turned away. The
silence was only broken by the distant cry of a watchman proclaiming the
hour and the weather. "El Sereno," as we called the old guardians of the
darkness in Majorca, where many a time we wandered with them in the dead
of night amidst the old palaces and watched them light up the wonderful
old Moorish remains with their swinging lanterns.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO POBLET.]

It was a very dark night, though the stars flashed overhead. We found
ourselves on the empty market-place, where trees whispered together. In
the morning, when fruit and flowers and a hundred stalls and a crowd of
noisy people called for all one's attention, the whispering trees were
neglected. Now it was their hour, and they told each other their mighty
secrets, and one felt that they were wiser and greater than mankind
in its little brief authority. We stood and listened, but they talked in
an unknown tongue. Almost as mysterious and full of meaning seemed the
outlines of th