ground floor; others had wrought-iron window-screens and double ajimez windows, with mouldings along the doors and balconies. The town had a large square, the Plaza Mayor, at one side of which stood the Town Hall, a fine palace in the Plateresque style, with six broad balconies, an upper story and a round escutcheon over the entrance arch. In the middle of the square was a fountain, with its tank. The houses of the square were supported on arcades, which were raised two or three feet above the level of the square itself. In the depths of the arcades were one or two small shops, mercers with piles of cloth and shawls; saddlers' shops; wax-chandlers in whose windows were set in admirable order votive offerings, carved candles, ornaments made of sugar and starch, and sweets which had become fossilized and had lost their colour. From the Plaza Mayor two cobbled streets went up to another square, on one side of which stood an ancient church, on another the high walls of a convent, on a third an old ancestral house. By the churchyard was a terrace with acacias and stone benches and a balcony from which one looked down on the town. From here Labraz appeared clustered round a large tower, a dark heap of roofs with their white chimneys and half-ruined houses. The country round it was of calcareous soil, and beyond was an extensive view of treeless mountains and bare hill-sides, red and white, undulating like the waves of the sea in endless succession. Close to the town were gardens, and along the
