Act IV

The garden of a villa in Granada. Whoever wishes to know what it is like
must go to Granada and see. One may prosaically specify a group of hills
dotted with villas, the Alhambra on the top of one of the hills, and
a considerable town in the valley, approached by dusty white roads in
which the children, no matter what they are doing or thinking about,
automatically whine for halfpence and reach out little clutching brown
palms for them; but there is nothing in this description except the
Alhambra, the begging, and the color of the roads, that does not fit
Surrey as well as Spain. The difference is that the Surrey hills are
comparatively small and ugly, and should properly be called the Surrey
Protuberances; but these Spanish hills are of mountain stock: the
amenity which conceals their size does not compromise their dignity.

This particular garden is on a hill opposite the Alhambra; and the villa
is as expensive and pretentious as a villa must be if it is to be let
furnished by the week to opulent American and English visitors. If we
stand on the lawn at the foot of the garden and look uphill, our horizon
is the stone balustrade of a flagged platform on the edge of infinite
space at the top of the hill. Between us and this platform is a flower
garden with a circular basin and fountain in the centre, surrounded
by geometrical flower beds, gravel paths, and clipped yew trees in the
genteelest order. The garden is higher than our lawn; so we reach it
by a few steps in the middle of its embankment. The platform is higher
again than the garden, from which we mount a couple more steps to look
over the balustrade at a fine view of the town up the valley and of the
hills that stretch away beyond it to where, in the remotest distance,
they become mountains. On our left is the villa, accessible by steps
from the left hand corner of the garden. Returning from the platform
through the garden and down again to the lawn (a movement which leaves
the villa behind us on our right) we find evidence of literary interests
on the part of the tenants in the fact that there is no tennis net nor
set of croquet hoops, but, on our left, a little iron garden table with
books on it, mostly yellow-backed, and a chair beside it. A chair on the
right has also a couple of open books upon it. There are no newspapers,
a circumstance which, with the absence of games, might lead an
intelligent spectator to the most far reaching conclusions as to the
sort of people who live in the villa. Such speculations are checked,
however, on this delightfully fine afternoon, by the appearance at
a little gate in a paling an our left, of Henry Straker in his
professional costume. He opens the gate for an elderly gentleman, and
follows him on to the lawn.