The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and
receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of
climates where they are so easily convertible. The _patio_ is the place
of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the _tertulia,_ and the family nightly
meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with
that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One _patio_ is often
much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as
the _patio_ of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her
_patio_ a sort of shrine to him. The famous _espada_ perished in his
heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and
now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his
worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.
Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as
elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the
Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but
there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the
pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in
the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of
the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to
secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution
and reform.
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