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