Cadiz is soon seen.  Notwithstanding its venerable age of three thousand years—­having been founded by Hercules, who figures on its coat-of-arms—­it is purely a commercial city, and has neither antiquities, nor historic associations that interest any but Englishmen.  It is compactly built, and covers a smaller space than accords with my ideas of its former splendor.  I first walked around the sea-ramparts, enjoying the glorious look-off over the blue waters.  The city is almost insulated, the triple line of fortifications on the land side being of but trifling length.  A rocky ledge stretches out into the sea from the northern point, and at its extremity rises the massive light-house tower, 170 feet high.  The walls toward the sea were covered with companies of idle anglers, fishing with cane rods of enormous length.  On the open, waste spaces between the bastions, boys had spread their limed cords to catch singing birds, with chirping decoys placed here and there in wicker cages.  Numbers of boatmen and peasants, in their brown jackets, studded with tags and bugles, and those round black caps which resemble smashed bandboxes, loitered about the walls or lounged on the grass in the sun.

Except along the Alameda, which fronts the bay, the exterior of the city has an aspect of neglect and desertion.  The interior, however, atones for this in the gay and lively air of its streets, which, though narrow, are regular and charmingly clean.  The small plazas are neatness itself, and one is too content with this to ask for striking architectural effects.  The houses are tall and stately, of the most dazzling whiteness, and though you could point out no one as a pattern of style, the general effect is chaste and harmonious.  In fact, there are two or three streets which you would almost pronounce faultless.  The numbers of hanging balconies and of court-yards paved with marble and surrounded with elegant corridors, show the influence of Moorish taste.  There is not a mean-looking house to be seen, and I have no doubt that Cadiz is the best built city of its size in the world.  It lies, white as new-fallen snow, like a cluster of ivory palaces, between sea and sky.  Blue and silver are its colors, and, as everybody knows, there can be no more charming contrast.

I visited both the old and new cathedrals, neither of which is particularly interesting.  The latter is unfinished, and might have been a fine edifice had the labor and money expended on its construction been directed by taste.  The interior, rich as it is in marbles and sculpture, has a heavy, confused effect.  The pillars dividing the nave from the side-aisles are enormous composite masses, each one consisting of six Corinthian columns, stuck around and against a central shaft.  More satisfactory to me was the Opera-House, which I visited in the evening, and where the dazzling array of dark-eyed Gaditanas put a stop to architectural criticism.  The women of Cadiz are noted for their beauty and their graceful gait.  Some of them are very beautiful, it is true; but beauty is not the rule among them.  Their gait, however, is the most graceful possible, because it is perfectly free and natural.  The commonest serving-maid who walks the streets of Cadiz would put to shame a whole score of our mincing and wriggling belles.