HE country between Salamanca and Valladolid is very flat, the finest corn-growing region in all Spain. Now a railway passes through it, and when the summer sun blazes on the thick shocks of wheat, they glisten as with living flames, while the crisp, hot wind passes fluttering by. As the sun sinks, a dazzling ball of fire, into banks of intense crimson, the shadows of the after-glow fall long and dark. Nothing but the horizon between earth and sky; a land, boundless, monotonous, reflecting the stubborn will of the nation. The only kingdom in Europe which has retained its mediæval character for good and bad, simple, grand, immutable as its great plains!
Passing the small station of Vento de Baños, the ruins of an ancient castle rise to the sight. It is built of small red bricks, tempered to a pale hue by time and sunshine, and the lofty walls broken by solid towers and bastions. From its low position the height seems great, and for this same reason the walls are of enormous strength.
This is the Castello de la Mota, built for Juan II. in 1444, and here his daughter, the great Isabel, has come to die.
It is not age which is killing her, for she is only fifty-four, but sorrow has done its work upon her tender heart.
Child after child has been taken from her. First, her only son Juan, barely twenty, always delicate, dying of a fever in the midst of rejoicings for his marriage with a princess of France. Vainly did Ferdinand, who had rushed to his side at the first symptoms of danger, break the news to her gently by letter, describing his gradual decline after he was really dead; but the shaft struck home.
“Never,” says Peter Martyr, “could the bereaved parents speak of him.”
They laid him in a sumptuous tomb in the Dominican church at Avila.
Even after the lapse of so many centuries their love appears in the minute care with which each detail of his marble monument is wrought. The calm, pure, upturned face of the boy, so delicate and young, the light regal circlet on the rich curls of hair, the simple folds of drapery, the small shapely feet, and thin, long hands; the iron gauntlets, placed on one side to show that he was knighted by his father in the field.
The mere artistic beauty of the work is forgotten in the anguish of the parents, who used to sit for hours in two stalls opposite, where they could gaze down on the effigy of their son. A picture of lonely