Toledo is a city where you should eschew guides and trust implicitly to
chance in your wanderings. You can never be lost; the town is so small
that a short walk always brings you to the river or the wall, and there
you can take a new departure. If you do not know where you are going,
you have every moment the delight of some unforeseen pleasure. There is
not a street in Toledo that is not rich in treasures of
architecture,--hovels that once were marvels of building, balconies of
curiously wrought iron, great doors with sculptured posts and lintels,
with gracefully finished hinges, and studded with huge nails whose
fanciful heads are as large as billiard balls. Some of these are still
handsome residences, but most have fallen into neglect and abandonment.
You may find a beggar installed in the ruined palace of a Moorish
prince, a cobbler at work in the pleasure-house of a Castilian
conqueror. The graceful carvings are mutilated and destroyed, the
delicate arabesques are smothered and hidden under a triple coat of
whitewash. The most beautiful Moorish house in the city, the so-called
Taller del Moro, where the grim governor of Huesca invited four hundred
influential gentlemen of the province to a political dinner, and cut off
all their heads as they entered (if we may believe the chronicle, which
we do not), is now empty and rapidly going to ruin. The exquisite
panelling of the walls, the endlessly varied stucco work that seems to
have been wrought by the deft fingers of ingenious fairies, is
shockingly broken and marred.
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