Irritated, he dismissed him, summoned another, put the same question, and received the same reply. This went on until at length one authority, before answering, drew the fruit towards him with the branch of a tree, picked it out of the water, and gave the true reply:
"Half an orange!"
There is a sound moral at the core of this orange.
There are five-and-twenty parish churches in Seville and two thousand priests; but, as too often happens on the Continent, the women were vastly more attentive than the men to observances of devotion. I made the acquaintance of a wealthy burgess, a dealer in curiosities, who asked me round to his shop to inspect some of the charming peasant costumes of Murcia, now fast falling into disuse—and a grievous pity it is. It was Friday when I visited him, and he was gobbling pork-chops.
"What! you a Christian, you a son of the Church!" I exclaimed.
"Ah! señor," he apologized; "forgive me! I am very frail, but my wife is so good a Christian. I reverence that woman. She has gone to Mass without breaking her fast, and when she returns she will only take one small cup of chocolate."
But all the burgesses of Seville are not like to him who practised mortification by proxy. The gentlefolk are pious, and the commonalty are not irreligious. Cheerfulness and sobriety are the rule; gambling and an idleness excused by the enervating influences of the too generous sun are the predominating vices, as elsewhere in Southern Spain.
I saw few ebullitions of temper, much hospitality among the poor, no downright thievishness, but the irresistible tendency to pass bad money—which is accounted a venial failing in the Peninsula.
The Cathedral is a superb pile, and occupies the site of an ancient mosque. The stained-glass windows are so many captive rainbows. Pretermitting talk about dimensions and the like, I may note some few of the remarkable features which are most apt to be recalled by the stranger. Foremost among these are the stone pulpit from which St. Vincent de Ferrer preached; the slab over the remains of Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus, whereon are inscribed the words (referring to his illustrious father), "A Castilla y á Leon Mundo Nuevo Dió Colon," and a Crucifixion by a Mexican negro, who was never known to paint any other subject. It is a peculiarity of artists of the Spanish school, in representations of the Sacrifice on Calvary, to use three nails and place the wound on the right side; Italians use four, and place it on the left. In the Capilla Real is the figure of the "Vírgen de los Reyes," the patron of Seville, a gift from St. Louis of France, surmounted by the identical crown with which the brow of the canonized monarch was pressed, and enclasped as to the throat by a diamond necklace valued at ninety thousand duros, presented by Doña Berenguela, the mother of St. Ferdinand. Among the treasures in the relicario of the sacristy is a massive gold group made of ore brought by Columbus from America, consisting of two figures sustaining a globe, the globe alone weighing fifteen pounds. Passing under a horseshoe arch, in a dusty corridor beside which is preserved the shrivelled mummy of an ungainly alligator sent by the Sultan of Egypt to Alonso the Wise when seeking his daughter's hand, the Chapter Library is reached. The prizes of this collection are the manuscripts of the discoverer of the New World and the book, "Tractatus de Imagine Mundi," which he took with him on the caravel when he first crossed the Atlantic. There are marginal notes to it in his own minute and legible handwriting, in one of which he lays down this apothegm of sad wisdom: "No one is secure from adversity." There are no especially beautiful pictures by Murillo—especially, I say, for all of his are beautiful—in the Cathedral, but the church of La Caridad contains two masterpieces: the "Miracle of our Lord feeding the Multitude," and that of "Moses bringing the Living Water from the Rock of Horeb." The latter is full of diversity of expression underlain by a thrill of mad eagerness brought out with a terrible truth. Another famous picture is the "Descent from the Cross" of Campana. This was painted in 1548, and was so natural that Murillo was never weary of resting in rapt contemplation before it, and on his death-bed asked to be buried at its feet in the church of Santa Cruz. He had his wish. But the dogs of war came panting that way. Soult entered Seville, pulled down the church, desecrated the master's grave, and stole all of his canvas he could lay his sacrilegious paws upon to grace the Louvre. The Spaniards do not love the French, nor is it astonishing.
Among the delights of Seville one of the chief must not fail to be enumerated—no shrieking newsboys shove latest editions into the face of the lounger. This is not a reading people; for a woman to know how to read was accounted immoral so late as the beginning of this century. There are some papers at Seville, nevertheless; among others, El Oriente, devoted to Carlism, and La Legitimidad, which advocated the interests of the ex-Queen Isabella's son and heir; but they have little to say. In the lack of suicides, stabs in the dark, and pronunciamientos, they are driven to fill up their space with extracts from the almanac and lists of letters thrown into the Post Office without prepayment. Some countryman must have caught the local disease, for in one list given in La Legitimidad it was notified that two envelopes had been indolently committed to the box without stamps, one addressed to "Miss Mary, Hyde Park," and the other to "Monsieur" (an evident misprint for "Mister") "Francis O'Mahony, Shankerhill."