“Want a Madrid lottery-ticket?”
“No indeed!”
“Want some contraband cigars?”
“No.”
“Want—?”
“Well?”
My friend scratched his chin: “Want to see the remains of the Cid?”
Gracious! what a leap! But no matter; let us go and see the remains of the Cid.
We went to the municipal palace, and there an old janitress made us cross three or four narrow passages until she stopped us where all of them converged. “Behold the remains!” said the woman, pointing to a sort of coffin resting upon a pedestal in the centre of the room. I approached and raised the cover and looked in. There were two compartments, at the bottom of which one could see some bones heaped together like fragments of broken furniture. “These,” said the old woman, “are the bones of the Cid, and these others the bones of Ximenes his wife.”
I took in my hand the shin-bone of one and a rib of the other, looked at them, felt them, and turned them over, but, as I was unable by their aid to resurrect the features of husband and wife, I replaced them. The woman showed me a wooden seat, almost in pieces, propped against the wall, and bearing an inscription which said that it was the seat upon which sat the first judges of Castile, Nunnius Rasura and Calvo Lainus, the great-great-grandfathers of the Cid; which is the same thing as saying that this precious piece of furniture has stood in the very same place for the goodly period of nine hundred years. I have it before my eyes at this moment, sketched in my note-book in serpentine lines, and I seem to hear the good woman asking, “Are you a painter?” as I stood leaning my chin on my pencil to admire my masterpiece. In the next room she showed me a brazier of the same antiquity as the old seat, and two paintings—one of the Cid and the other of Ferdinand Gonzales, the first count of Castile, both of which are so dark and faded that they do not suggest the image of those personages any better than did the shin-bone and the ribs of the illustrious consorts.