As we parted from the good fathers and entered our carriages at the door of the church, the swarm of mendicants had become an army. The word had doubtless gone through the city of the outlandish men who had gone into the Cathedral with whole coats, and the result was a levee en masse of the needy. Every coin that was thrown to them but increased the clamor, as it confirmed them in their idea of the boundless wealth and munificence of the givers. We recalled the profound thought of Emerson, "If the rich were only as rich as the poor think them!"
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At last we drove desperately away through the ragged and screaming throng. We passed by the former home of the Jeronomite monks of the Parral, which was once called an earthly paradise, and in later years has been a pen for swine; past crumbling convents and ruined churches; past the charming Romanesque San Millan, girdled with its round-arched cloisters; the granite palace of his Reverence the Bishop of Segovia, and the elegant tower of St. Esteban, where the Roman is dying and the Gothic is dawning; and every step of the route is a study and a joy to the antiquarian.
But though enriched by all these legacies of an immemorial past, there seems no hope, no future for Segovia. It is as dead as the cities of the Plain. Its spindles have rusted into silence. Its gay company is gone. Its streets are too large for the population, and yet they swarm with beggars. I had often heard it compared in outline to a ship,--the sunrise astern and the prow pointing westward,--and as we drove away that day and I looked back to the receding town, it seemed to me like a grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the
A CASTLE IN THE AIR
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tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times hidden in the rosy sunset, which they shall never see.
