the whole fortress under a magic spell.  By this means it had remained standing for several years, in defiance of storms and earthquakes, while almost all other buildings of the Moors had fallen to ruin and disappeared.  This spell, the tradition went on to say, would last until the hand on the outer arch should reach down and grasp the key, when the whole pile would tumble to pieces, and all the treasures buried beneath it by the Moors would be revealed.”

The travelers at once made application to the governor for permission to take up their residence in the palace of the Alhambra, and to their astonishment and delight he placed his own suite of apartments at their disposal, as he himself preferred to live in the city of Granada.

Irving’s companion soon left him, and he remained sole lord of the palace.  For a time he occupied the governor’s rooms, which were very scantily furnished; but one day he came upon an eerie suite of rooms which he liked better.  They were the rooms that had been fitted up for the beautiful Elizabetta of Farnese, the second wife of Philip V.

“The windows, dismantled and open to the wind and weather, looked into a charming little secluded garden, where an alabaster fountain sparkled among roses and myrtles, and was surrounded by orange and citron trees, some of which flung their branches into the chambers.”  This was the garden of Lindaraxa.

“Four centuries had elapsed since the fair Lindaraxa passed away, yet how much of the fragile beauty of the scenes she inhabited remained!  The garden still bloomed in which she delighted; the fountain still presented the crystal mirror in which her charms may once have been reflected; the alabaster, it is true, had lost its whiteness; the basin beneath, overrun with weeds, had become the lurking-place of the lizard, but there was something in the very decay that enhanced the interest of the scene, speaking as it did of the mutability, the irrevocable lot of man and all his works.”

In spite of warnings of the dangers of the place, Irving had his bed set up in the chamber beside this little garden.  The first night was full of frightful terrors.  The garden was dark and sinister.  “There was a slight rustling noise overhead; a bat suddenly emerged from a broken panel of the ceiling, flitting about the room and athwart my solitary lamp; and as the fateful bird almost flouted my face with his noiseless wing, the grotesque faces carved in high relief in the cedar ceiling, whence he had emerged, seemed to mope and mow at me.

“Rousing myself, and half smiling at this temporary weakness, I resolved to brave it out in the true spirit of the hero of the enchanted house,” says the narrator.  So taking his lamp in his hand he started out to make a midnight tour of the palace.

“My own shadow, cast upon the wall, began to disturb me,” he continues.  “The echoes of my own footsteps along the corridors made me pause and look around.  I was traversing scenes fraught with dismal recollections.  One dark passage led down to the mosque where Yusef, the Moorish monarch, the finisher of the Alhambra, had been basely murdered.  In another place I trod the gallery where another monarch had been struck down by the poniard of a relative whom he had thwarted in his love.”