the profits, would have. been England's. "What a pity that monk overtook him!" exclaimed an Anglo-Saxon member of our party. It is perhaps needless to observe that the sentiment was not applauded by the rest of us.

The first view of the Alhambra, as it nestles on the white bosom of the Sierra Nevada, in the rosy evening sunlight, awakens a feeling of sympathy for poor Boabdil weeping in disappointment and sorrow on the Hill of the Last Sigh, as he gaze for the last time on his palace of bewitching beauty. When we wandered next day through the splendid apartments of his mother, we understood her bitter rebuke to her son, not to weep like a woman for

that which he failed to defend like a man. To be driven from such a home would break the heart of any woman.

The Alhambra was built by the Moorish kings for a royal palace seven hundred years ago. For me to attempt to describe its beauty, even after centuries of decay and neglect, would be presumptuous and absurd. Prescott, Hay, and Irving have produced inimitable pen-pictures of the Alhambra. Irving lived for months within its walls before writing his splendid work; but even their descriptions seem tame when gazing on the reality on a bright sunny day, with the orange and myrtle filling the air with sensuous perfume, and the sunlight reflected from ten thousand gilded pendents, or filtering through walls. three feet in thickness, and adorned with

marble carvings of delicate, lacelike design so fine as to scarcely impede the passage of the sun's rays. Beautiful indeed and enchanting must have been the palace in its glory, with its wonderful arabesques, its ceilings inlaid with ivory, pearl, gold and precious stones, and furnished throughout in the luxurious style which only Asiatics seem to know perfectly. Many believe that Aladdin's palace, pictured in the Arabian Nights, was none other than the Alhambra.

For a time after the conquest of Granada, an attempt was made to preserve this best specimen of Saracenic art in Spain, but it proved a very expensive task. Yet, despite the centuries of neglect and the vandalism of Spanish soldiers, it is still worth crossing the ocean

to see.

Columbus. "There she lies, tall, marblethroated, abundant-haired and regularfeatured, with the shoulders of a goddess and the gesture of a queen, the mask of a noble soul in a fair frame. A frigid smile lingers upon her strong lips, her aspect serene 'as moonlight sleeping on

old age. However, history has long since given its verdict that in the case of Ferdinand and Isabella, the latter fully deserved the title of better half. In fact, Ferdinand himself conceded this, for upon the gold-embroidered tent, still to be seen in the treasury of tapes

tries in Seville, which they occupied before Granada in the siege of 1492, there is a Latin inscription in letters eighteen inches long announcing to all that Isabella is the greater sovereign. This fact daily flaunted in the faces of his soldiers must have chastened Ferdinand and made him submissive. In a beautifully frescoed sacristy in the Carthusian monastery at Granada are preserved some very beautiful vestment cases, etc., inlaid with silver, ebony, tortoise-shell and pearl. A cross is painted on the wall so realistically that you feel certain that at least the nails are real. Many beautiful paintings are scattered through the buildings, amid many grewsome pictures of members of the Order that were martyred in England during the Reformation.

We left Granada with reluctance. It is a quaint old town which the introduction of gas, street-cars and large stores is fast modernizing. The gypsy is still here on his native heath; and all his subtlety and cajolery-the fantastic costumes of the men and the wild gracefulness of the young girls and childrenare employed to extract coin from the unwary traveler. One quickly learns in Spain the significance of "manana” (man ya na). It is the Spanish word for to-morrow, and expresses the national custom of never doing to-day what can be put off till to-morrow. The tourist soon finds it tripping from his tongue, and glibly promises alms "manana." But we are off for Seville-and in Seville there are no beggars.

T is only a few years ago that an unknown French preacher, living quietly and contentedly in the midst of his family and finding time to think a little in his tranquil round of duties and diversions, gathered the reflections of his leisure into a little book which he called "The Simple Life."

It did not create much stir in his native country, where the philosophy of unhurried and uncomplicated living was common enough, but having found its way in a translation to this country, it appealed to our strenuous President, was advertised by his impulsive praise, and rapidly became a fad.

Of all the paradoxes which enliven the American character, few have been more amusing than this sudden enthusiasm for simplicity which the cir culation of Pastor Wagner's book has created. We have taken up simplicity for the moment as strenuously as we have lent our energies to money-making, or to piling up those artificialities of life under which our original state has long been buried. Mr. Wagner has given us no new thought; he has not even invested old thoughts with a new grace of expression. He is somewhat commonplace, somewhat dull; to those who have heard his philosophy put so much more strikingly, so much more inspiringly, he is even somewhat tiresome. But he has attracted the attention of the superficial; for the nonce he has America, so to speak, by the ear, and he is gaining in this country the fame which his work has failed to win in his own.

We are all reading "The Simple Life," and somewhat renovating our conversation by discussing whether we shall abolish lace curtains and bric-a-brac, and whether it might not be just as well to cease to compete with a $10,000 income on a $1,000 salary. We begin to

wonder dimly whether there may not be enjoyments which are not "entertainments;" resources which are not dollars; anxieties which arise not because we have too little but because we want too much; compensations in relinquishments as well as in accumulations; whether, in short, we are not losing the joy of life by complicating the means for its attainment.

The reaction is a fad, of course, but it is a wholesome fad, and however little we may grant the originality of Pastor Wagner, or respect the depth of those who will hail his philosophy as a new revelation, we cannot but be glad of the accident which introduced into the merely superficial mind a doubt as to the wisdom and sufficiency of its purely material ambitions.

It is only an echo of greater voices that breaks on the world at this day to preach the simple life, but since the echo has caught the ear which the greater voices have failed to reach, it is ungracious to be too critical of its quality.

And what is the simple life? It is the life which all philosophers have advocated, from Socrates to Thoreau-the life in which the development of the man counts for more than the acquisition of matter; in which there is leisure for thought; in which there are higher and less harassing ambitions than the effort for wealth or honor or power or any worldly advantage.

More than that, it is the life which all saints have lived and preached, from Anthony the Hermit, with his crust and cave in the desert, to Thomas a'Kempis, in whose "Imitation of Christ" there is the key to a simplicity of mind and heart and spirit such as Mr. Wagner has not dreamed of in his philosophy.

The simple life is, in fact, the imitation of Christ. In all the French preach