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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

Twenty-seven years elapsed before the Moors were wholly dislodged from the Pyrenees, but in 1492 their capital, Granada, was taken by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the great peninsula was again under Christian rule, prepared to enter on the “ heritage of the West,” and to make gracious response to that eloquent appeal of Columbus:

“ I ask but for a million maravedes;

Give me three caravels to find a world,

New shores, new realms, new soldiers for the Cross! ”

* In a picture gallery in the palace of Generaliffe hangs the portrait of Boabdil, the last of the Moorish kings of Spain; in the tower of Comares, in the Alhambra, are the rooms where he was imprisoned by his father, from the gallery of which his mother lowered him with scarfs, to escape the cruelties of a parent who hated and repudiated him; the gate through which he departed from the Alhambra, when about to surren­der his capital to Ferdinand and Isabella, was walled up at his request. A tablet on the walls of a small mosque relates that on this spot Boabdil surrendered the keys to the Castilian sovereigns. PYom the summit of one of the Alpuxarras Mountains the unfortunate Boabdil took his last look of Granada; there is the rock where he stood and turned his eyes away from taking their farewell gaze, still called “ el ultimo suspiro del Moro (the last sigh of the Moor), and there it was that the reproach of his mother embittered his heart. “You do well to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man.”

“Woe is me!” was the mournful cry of the dethroned monarch, as he led his for­lorn troops through the mountain pass, over the beloved Andalusian plains, away to the desert sands of Africa.

“Winding along at break of day,

And armed with helm and spears,

Along the martyr’s rocky way,

A king comes with his peers;

Unto the eye a splendid sight,

Making the air all richly bright,

Seen flashing through the trees;

But, to the heart, a scene of blight,

Sadder than death were these.

“For brightly fall the morning rays Upon a conquer’d king;

The breeze that with his banner plays,

Plays with an abject thing.

Banner and king no more will know Their rightful place ’mid friend and foe:

Proud clarion, cease thy blast!

Or, changing to the wail of woe,

Breathe dirges for the past.

“Along, along, by rock and tower,

That they have failed to keep,

By wood and vale, their father’s dower,

The exiled warriors sweep.

The chevroned steed, no more elate,

As if he knew his rider’s fate,

Steps languidly and slow,

As if he knew Granada’s gate Now open to the foe!