It would seem to have been the unwonted sense of an assured income that gave him courage to undertake the support of a wife, for in this year 1861 his constant friend Correa obtained for him a position on the staff of a new Madrid daily, _El Contemporáneo_, a journal into whose labors he threw himself with a zest far beyond his strength and which he came to love with a touching enthusiasm. “_El Contemporáneo_ is not for me a newspaper like any other; its columns are yourselves, my friends, my comrades in hope or disappointment, in failure or triumph, in joy or bitterness.” It was in _El Contemporáneo_ that many of his legends appeared. But even as he thus became more and more closely identified with the life of Madrid, homesickness grew upon him for his own Andalusia “with her golden days and luminous, transparent nights,”--for his own Seville, “with her Giralda of lace-work mirrored in the trembling Guadalquivir, ... with her barred windows and her serenades, her iron door-screens and her night watchmen that chant the hour, her shrines and her stories, her brawls and her music, her tranquil nights and fiery afternoons, her rosy dawns and azure twilights,--Seville, with all the traditions that twenty centuries have heaped upon her brow, with all the pageantry and festal beauty of her southern nature, with all the poetry that imagination lends to a beloved memory.”