describe badly because in the days I refer to the heaps of ruins left by the first siege had been used to mount batteries and raise barricades in points where the houses did not offer a natural defence.
Near the fortification of the Ebro were some remnants of an ancient wall, with various little towers of masonry which some persons supposed to be from the hands of the Romans, and others judged to be the work of the Moors. In my time—I do not know how it may be now—these pieces of wall seemed to be mortised into the houses, or rather the houses were mortised into them, appearing like props and corners of that ancient work, blackened but not crumbled by the passing of so many centuries. The new had been built in a confused way upon the ruins of the old, as the Spanish people had developed and grown upon the spoils of other peoples of mixed bloods, until they became as they are today.
The general aspect of the district of Las Tenerías brought to the imagination pleasant fancies of all that had taken place during Moorish rule, the abundance of brick, the long gable ends, the irregular fronts, the window lattices with shutters, the complete architectural anarchy, making it impossible to know where one house ended and another began, or of distinguishing whether this had two floors or three, or if that roof served to support the walls of that one over there. The streets at best ended in yards with no ways out. The archways, which gave entrance to a little square, reminded me that here was a vista upon another Spanish people, very different from those now here.
This amalgamation of houses which I have described to you, this suburb built up by many generations of laborers and peasants and tanners, according to the caprice of each, without order or harmony, had prepared itself for the defence on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth days of January, at the time when the French began to display their pomp of attack by placing forces on that side. All the families living in the houses of this suburb proceeded to build works according to their