A SPANISH FUNERAL AND A JONESVILLE ONE.
While we wuz in Madrid we felt that we ort to anyway visit the Escuriel, that immense palace and monastery built by Philip II. He got skairt, so I wuz told, and made a vow to St. Lawrence (it wuz on that saint’s day) that if Lawrence would help him git the victory, he would build a monastery and name it after him. So havin’ won the victory, he did as he agreed. He built this immense structure; it took him twenty-one years to do it. Out of compliment to Lawrence, who perished on a gridiron, it wuz built in that form.
I hearn Josiah a-explainin’ it that day. Sez he, “It wuz built in the form of a gridiron because that is the best way of cookin’ beef.” Sez he, “After their bull-fights they have immense quantities of beef, so this takes its shape from that national characterestick.”
But it hain’t no sech thing—he gits things wrong.
Wall, it wouldn’t took us but a little while to git to the Escuriel if the train had sprunted up and gone as fast as an American hand-car.
But we crept along so slow that it took us three hours. Before we got there we see the buildin’ loomin’ up so vast, so gloomy, that it looked like a mountain itself—a low, big mountain without much of a peak to it.
We had to approach it with some dignity, it bein’ a royal palace, so we got into a big covered omnibus, drawed by four mules and two horses. Though what peticular dignity there is in a mule I never see before, unless it is in their ears. But we got there all right, the driver a-yellin’ and whippin’ the mules as if he wuz crazy. If you want beauty, you won’t git it in the Escuriel, but if you want size, there you are suited. It takes up as much room as one of the pyramids; it has two thousand rooms in it and five thousand winders, and the winders wuzn’t very thick together, neither.
There is a big meetin’-house in it, a palace and a monastery and a Pantheon, where the dead kings and mothers of kings sleep and forgit the troublesome days when they sot on thrones, and worried about their children who wuz settin’.
This meetin’-house is grand and imposin’; you can look down inside a long, clear space of four hundred feet. Then there is a library, one of the finest in Spain, and picters that are dretful impressive in number and beauty. We wanted to see the private room of Philip II., and so we wuz led up grand staircases and through apartment after apartment hung with the costliest tapestry.
And havin’ seen sech glory on the outside, what did we imagine must be the splendor of the inner room, sacred to his majesty, where he sat alone and sent out orders that ruled half or three quarters of the world.