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The people went about leisurely as at all times; the market was thronged with bare-headed women buying fruit and carne; we heard the twang and tinkle of string bands in the patios of the cantinas. We could see that it was a waiting game that Don Rafael was playing. "His residencia was a large but low building around a great courtyard in grounds crowed with ornamental trees and tropic shrubs.

We made what we could of other patios in the vicinity, especially of one in the palace across from San Gregorio, to which the liveried porter welcomed us, though the noble family was in residence, and allowed us to mount the red-carpeted staircase to a closed portal in consideration of the peseta which he correctly foresaw.

I looked down at Seville from above. A Spanish town wears always its most picturesque appearance thus seen, but it is never different; the patios glaring with whitewash, the roofs of brown and yellow tiles, and the narrow streets, winding in unexpected directions, narrower than ever from such a height and dark with shade, so that they seem black rivulets gliding stealthily through the whiteness.

The noblemen's houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with which they opened their patios to the gaze of the stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide.

They are given over, for the most part to Chinese and Japanese merchants; but through the open windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and the parrot calls out "swear words" of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.

Saddle makers, squatted on the ground, are busy fashioning saddletrees, carving, and sewing leather. The shoemaker is hard at work with needle and awl. These and many other trades are all going on at once. These courts, which are called patios, were generally several acres in extent and at the most flourishing period of the missions each settlement often gave shelter to over a thousand people.

Near by is the Casa de Mondragon which he should as little miss if he has any pleasure in houses with two patios perching on the gardened brink of a precipice and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys in the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing up from it over the face of the cliff.

This physician had a fine house in the street of Las Palmas, a great avenue planted with graceful trees, that has other little streets running into it. Down one of these I came from my inn, a quiet narrow place having houses with patios or courtyards on either side of it. As I walked down this street I noticed a man sitting in the shade on a stool in the doorway of his patio.

Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.

Here were no standardized patios, but little marble aprons that were as much a part of the over-all architecture as a glen is a part of a woods. Here were no stereotyped picture windows, but walls that blended imperceptibly into pleasing patterns of transparency.