The
poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free of
a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as
could not be bought for money in New York.
Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church
of San Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that
Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I say
better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected the love of
a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors slay his son rather
than surrender a city to them. But I could only pay honor to her
pathetic memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of hers who
rushed into the flames to right the garments on the form which the wind
had blown them away from, and so perished with her. We had to take on
trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three
emperors were born, and whose "palaces, aqueducts, and temples and
circus were magnificent." We had bought some of the "coins daily dug
up," but we intrusted to the elements those "vestiges of vestiges" left
of Trajan's palaces after an envious earthquake destroyed them so lately
as 1755.
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