I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep
within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away
in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of
Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular
despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening
from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained
measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an
exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there
remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has
ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage
lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this belief because
when we came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we
had not the courage to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that
hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of henhouse which
pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for calcimining the rooms on
the _patio._

By the time we returned we found a guide waiting for us, and we agreed
with him for a day's service. He did not differ with other authorities
as to the claims of Cordova on the tourist's interest. From being the
most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of the Caliphs
it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books and most of the
travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial towns. It is no longer
the center of learning; and though it cannot help doing a large business
in olives, with the orchards covering the hills around it, the business
does not seem to be a very active one. "The city once the abode of the
flower of Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent O'Shea in his
_Guide to Spain, "_is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the
absentee senorio; their 'solares' are desert and wretched, the streets
ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and