ns of the Darro and Xenil.

"As night closes, the capricious scene assumes new features. Light
after light gradually twinkles forth; here a taper from a balconied
window; there a votive lamp before the image of a saint. Thus, by
degrees, the city emerges the banners of the haughty chiefs of
Spain, and flaunted in triumph through these Moslem halls. I
picture to myself Columbus, the future discoverer of a world, taking
his modest stand in a remote corner, the humble and neglected
spectator of the pageant. I see in imagination the Catholic
sovereigns prostrating themselves before the altar, and pouring
forth thanks for their victory; while the vaults resound with sacred
minstrelsy and the deep-toned Te Deum.

"The transient illusion is over,--the pageant melts from the fancy,
--monarch, priest, and warrior return into oblivion with the poor
Moslems over whom they exulted. The hall of their triumph is waste
and desolate. The bat flits about its twilight vault, and the owl
hoots from the neighboring tower of Comares."

It is a Moslem tradition that the court and army of Boabdil the
Unfortunate, the last Moorish king of Granada, are shut up in the
mountain by a powerful enchantment, and that it is written in the book of
fate that when the enchantment is broken, Boabdil will descend from the
mountain at the head of his army, resume his throne in the Alhambra, and,
gathering together the enchanted warriors from all parts of Spain,
reconquer the peninsula. Nothing in this volume is more amusing and at
the same time more poetic and romantic than the story of "Governor Manco
and the Soldier," in which this legend is used to cover the exploit of a
dare-devil contrabandista. But it is too long to quote. I take,
therefore, another story, which has something of the same elements, that
of a merry mendicant student of Salamanca, Don Vicente by name, who
wandered from village to village, and picked up a living by playing the
guitar for the peasants, among whom he was sure of a hearty welcome.
In the course of his wandering he had found a seal-ring, having for its
device the cabalistic sign invented by King Solomon the Wise, and of
mighty power in all cases of enchantment.

"At length he arrived at the great object of his musical
vagabondizing, the far-famed city of Granada, and hailed with wonder
and delight its Moorish towers, its lovely v