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Rh latter; "but my Manuel has been there a hundred times. Once he went there with an Englishman who wanted to see them. Between the two peaks there is a ravine that is full of water; and that is a cauldron that the demons made. From the middle of it come strange sounds that are caused by the hammering of the demons mending the cauldron. The whole place is a desert, full of naked rocks, and so awesome and solitary that the Englishman said it was like the Dead Sea—a sea that it seems there is in some of those far-off countries."

"Oh, mother! and why did it die?" asked the girl.

"How should I know?" answered the mother.

"Father," said the girl, repeating her question: "why did that sea die? Did the Moors kill it?"

"What a question!" returned the father, who did not wish to confess his ignorance of the matter, as his wife had done: "it died because everything in the world dies, even the seas."

"And is the whole mountain like that?" asked Maria.

"No, for lower down there are trees,—chestnuts, oaks and shrubs, and some fine apple trees planted by the Moors, whose fruit is sent to Granada to be sold."

"And I was told," continued John Joseph, "that there are wild goats there that run faster than water down a hill, that leap like