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ing, and asserted his unconquered nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" You see nothing of this defiant spirit in Spanish servants. They are heartily glad to find employment, and ask no higher good-fortune than to serve acceptably. As to drawing comparisons between themselves and their masters, they never seem to think they belong to the same race. I saw a pretty grisette once stop to look at a show-window where there was a lay-figure completely covered with all manner of trusses. She gazed at it long and earnestly, evidently thinking it was some new fashion just introduced into the gay world. At last she tripped away with all the grace of her unfettered limbs, saying, "If the fine ladies have to wear all those machines, I am glad I am not made like them."
Whether it be from their more regular and active lives, or from their being unable to pay for medical attendance, the poorer classes suffer less from sickness than their betters. An ordinary Spaniard is sick but once in his life, and that once is enough,--'twill serve. The traditions of the old satires
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which represented the doctor and death as always hunting in couples still survive in Spain. It is taken as so entirely a matter of course that a patient must die that the law of the land imposed a heavy fine upon physicians who did not bring a priest on their second visit. His labor of exhortation and confession was rarely wasted. There were few sufferers who recovered from the shock of that solemn ceremony in their chambers. Medical science still labors in Spain under the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety. The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators. Why these probes, these lancets, these multifarious drugs, when the object in view could be so much more easily obtained by the judicious application of masses and prayers?
So it has come about that the doctor is a Pariah, and miracles flourish in the Peninsula. At every considerable shrine you will see the walls covered with waxen models of feet, legs, hands, and arms
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secured by the miraculous interposition of the genius loci, and scores of little crutches attesting the marvellous hour when they became useless. Each shrine, like a mineral spring, has its own especial virtue. A Santiago medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Oña acted as a vermifuge on royal infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They turn out their score or so of miracles every feast-day, it is true, but are no longer capable of the tours de force of earlier days. Cardinal de Retz saw with his eyes a man whose wooden legs were turned to capering flesh and blood by the image of the Pillar of Saragossa. But this was in the good old times before newspapers and telegraphs had come to dispel the twilight of belief.