HEROIC SPAIN

HEROIC SPAIN

BY
E. BOYLE O'REILLY

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY
1910

COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY DUFFIELD AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

HEROIC SPAIN

"Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee,
All things are passing,
God never changeth.
Patient endurance
Attaineth to all things,
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting,
Alone God sufficeth."

MAXIMS OF SAINT TERESA

"All national criticism in bulk is misleading and foolish, and I look on the belief of Spaniards that Spain ought to be great and strong as the most promising agency of her future regeneration."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
As Minister to Spain, in a letter Oct. 20, 1877

INTRODUCTION
PRACTICAL HINTS

TRAVEL in Spain to-day is attended with little hardship and no danger whatever. Even if one barely knows a word of the language, it is not foolhardy to explore the distant provinces. Commit a few simple sentences to the memory and have courage in using them, for Spanish is pronounced just as it is spelled, with a few exceptions soon observed. The merest beginner is understood.

When a trip into Spain is planned it would be well to send for information about the kilometric ticket to the Chemins de Fer Espagnols, 20 Rue Chauchat, Paris. They will mail you, gratis, a pamphlet with a map of the country, where is marked the number of kilometers between the cities; from this it is easy to calculate how large a ticket to buy. The more kilometers taken at one time, the cheaper it is. Thus a ticket of 2,000 k. costs 165 pesetas; one of 5,000 k. costs 385 p., and so on. We got a 10,000 kilometric ticket for two people, first class, good for ten months, paying for it 682 pesetas. If the ticket is bought outside of Spain you pay for it in francs, whereas if bought in Spain, you pay in pesetas, which are about fifteen per cent less than francs. Provide yourself with your photograph, and at the first Spanish town—Irún, if you come from Paris, and Port-Bou if from Marseilles—as there is always a pause of some hours on the frontier for the customs, it is a simple matter to buy your carnet kilométrique in the station. It is only on one or two short local lines that these tickets are not accepted. Unfortunately the new rail from Gibraltar up to Bobadilla, by way of which many tourists enter Spain, is one of these disobliging minor lines. In fact many who start their trip from the south have found difficulty in procuring a kilometric ticket till they reached Seville or Granada; this confuses the traveler, and makes him decide the ticket is too complicated for practical use. If he comes to visit merely the southern province of Andalusia, which is what most people see of Spain, with a run up to Madrid for the pictures, then, unless several are traveling as one family, there is little gained by the carnet, since a few hundred unused miles are sometimes wasted. But for the complete tour of Spain the kilometric ticket is the most satisfactory arrangement. Besides the reduction it makes in the fare, it saves the confusion of changing money in the stations. You go to the ticket office before boarding a train, have the coupons to be used torn off, and are given a complementary ticket to hand to the conductor on the train. It is well to buy the official railway guide as it saves asking questions, for Spanish trains, though they crawl at a snail's pace, start at the hour announced, and arrive on the minute set down in the time-table.

Thirty kilos, about sixty-six pounds, are allowed free in the luggage van, but for an extensive tour it is better to send trunks ahead by some agency, and travel with only the valises taken with you in the carriage. These the mozo, or porter, carries directly from the train to the hotel omnibus, which—another good custom of the country—is always in waiting, no matter at what hour the arrival. First class travel in Spain is about the same as second class elsewhere; second class is like third class in France, except on the express route from Paris to Madrid, and in Catalonia, where second class is comfortable.

A hasty sketch of our tour may help later travelers. We entered from the north, by Biarritz, a far better way of seeing the country in its natural sequence than the usual landing at Gibraltar. One feels that the north of Spain, in the truest degree national, untouched by the Moor, has never had justice done it. If a transatlantic liner touched at one of the northern ports, such as Vigo, Santander, Bilbao, it would open up an untrodden Switzerland with fertile valleys and noble hills. No pleasanter summer tour, on bicycle or afoot, could be made than through the Basque provinces, Asturias, the national cradle of Spain, or in beautiful Galicia with its trout rivers. In summer the climate is cool and pleasant, and the most isolated valleys are so safe that any two women could travel alone with security.

Our first stop was at Loyola in the Basque country; then a week in Burgos; a short stay at Valladolid and Palencia; over the Asturian Mountains to Oviedo; back to León City, and from there across other hills to Galicia, seeing Lugo, Coruña, and Santiago in that province; from Coruña to Santiago by diligence, as no rail yet connects the two cities. We returned to León province from Galicia, skirting the Miño River which divides Spain and Portugal; stopped a night at Astorga, some days in Salamanca, and made a short pause in Zamora.

Time must not be a consideration in touring these unfrequented cities of middle Spain, for their local trains are few and far between. Only twice a week is there direct communication between Salamanca and Medina del Campo, the junction station on the express route. But if you accept once for all the slowness of the trains, the occasional odd hour of arrival or starting, the inconvenience of a distantly-set station, you cease to fret and scold as do most hurried travelers. We ended by finding the long railway journeys rather restful than otherwise. Usually we had the Reservado para Señoras carriage to ourselves, except on the express line from Paris to Madrid, and we soon learned how to make ourselves comfortable for a whole day's journey, seizing the chance of taking exercise during the long pauses in the stations, and enjoying the human-hearted scenes there witnessed; for a Spaniard greets and bids farewell with the same unconsciousness, the same absence of mauvaise honte as when he prays or makes love.

Also I found the topography of the country of endless interest during the long train trips; to climb up to the great truncated mountain which is central Spain, to see how the still higher ranges of mountains crossed it, how the famous rivers flowed, the setting of the historic cities,—I never tired of looking out on it all. Somehow I have got tucked away a distinct picture of Spain's physical geography, no doubt due to the leisurely railway journeys, which are not so slow that the proportion of the whole is lost, as foot or horse travel would be, nor yet so fast as to jumble the picture, as with the express trips in some countries.

Spain is not beautiful like Italy, nor of the orderly finished type of England or France; she has few of Germany's grand forests. There is no denying she is a gaunt, denuded, tragic land; the desolation of the vast high steppes of Castile is terrible. Only the fringing coasts along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are fertile. Nevertheless, unbeautiful as is the landscape, it possesses an unaccountable magnificence that grips the mind; we never took a night trip unless forced to it, so strangely interesting were the hours spent in looking from the car window.

After Salamanca we went to Segovia, then across the Guadarramas to the Escorial, and slightly back north by the same mountains to Avila. Segovia and Avila are true old mediæval cities of the inmost heart of the race, España la heróica incarnate. Again passing through the hills, whose cold blue atmosphere Velasquez has made immortally real, we went to Madrid. From there, south, we struck the beaten tourist track with pestering guides and higher prices in the hotels. Up to this we had driven, on arrival in a town, to the first or second hotel mentioned in Baedeker, and the average charge had been seven pesetas a day, all included. The provincial hotels gave a surprisingly good table; excellent soups, fresh fish, the meats fair, and all presented in a savory way; the fact that many men of the town use the hotel as a restaurant has much to do with the generous menu. The rooms were cold and bare, but clean, for not one night of distress did we spend during the eight months' tour. Of course certain modern comforts were completely lacking, but we were grateful enough for clean beds and wholesome food. The taking of money for hospitality is thought degrading by this chivalrous people, so the traveler should not judge them by the innkeeper class with whom he comes in contact. I found courtesy as a rule and honesty even in the inns; having valises that could not lock, I yet lost nothing. From Toledo on, we began to go, not to the best hotel mentioned in the guide book, for that now had an average charge of twenty-five francs a day, but we chose some minor inn, such as the Fonda da Lino, in Toledo, once the first hostelry in the city before the "Palace" variety was started for the American tourist.

We had spent October and November in seeing the northern provinces whose piercing cold made us only too glad to settle for the four winter months in Andalusia; a day at Cordova, a fortnight in Granada, a trip to Cadiz, and the bulk of the time in Seville, the best city in Spain for a prolonged stay, though Barcelona also can offer good winter quarters. In April we went north into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, then returned to Madrid for another sight of its unrivaled gallery, and also because all routes focus from the capital like the spokes of a wheel. We continued east to Guadalajara and Sigüenza, stopped some days at Saragossa, then descended by Poblet to the warm fertile coast again, to tropical Tarragona and that industrial anomaly in an hidalgo land, Barcelona. After spending some weeks there, in the beginning of June we left Spain by the Port-Bou frontier, stopping at Gerona on the way out.

Thus we had seen some twenty-five Spanish cities—some twenty-five glorious cathedrals!—in a leisurely journey of eight months. Any spot along the southern fringe is suitable for the winter, any spot along the northern coast for the summer, but in high cold middle-Spain travel for pleasure must be limited to early autumn or late spring: we froze to death in Burgos and Salamanca during October, and again shivered and chattered with the April cold of Guadalajara and Sigüenza.

As to guide books, Baedeker is as good as any, though the Baedeker for Spain is not equal to that firm's guides for the rest of Europe. Murray's "Hand-book" is more entertaining, but is rather to be kept as amusing literature than used as a guide book, much of it being the personal opinions and prejudices of Richard Ford, and bristling all over with slurs at Spain's religion. It does not seem reasonable for English-speaking travelers to see this original country through the eyes of a clever but crochety Englishman who wandered over it on horseback eighty years ago: we should not like a European to judge America by Dickens' notebook dating back to the forties.

There are two bits of advice I would give to those who would thoroughly enjoy traveling in the Peninsula. Pick up as soon as possible something of the tongue or you miss shadings that give depth and strength to the impression. If one knows Latin or French or Italian, it is easy to read Spanish. And I would beg every unhurried traveler to carry in his pocket the "Romancero del Cid," Spain's epic, and "Don Quixote," her great novel, the truest-hearted book ever written. I defy a man to while away a winter in Spain with el ingenioso hidalgo his daily companion, or sit reading the "Cid" above the Tajus gorge at Toledo, and not learn to love this virile, ascetic, realistic, exalted, and passionate land, where a peasant is instinctively a gentleman, where a grandee is in practice a democrat, where certain small meanesses, such as snobbishness, close-fisted love of money, are unknown.

The second advice is to bring to Spain some smattering of architectural knowledge, or half the charm of lingering in her old cities is lost,—also is lessened one's chance to catch unaware the soul of this mystic, profoundly religious race. Here I should end, as I head these lines of introduction with the words: Practical hints. And yet, just as it is well nigh impossible in Spain to dissociate the churches themselves from the religious scenes daily witnessed under their Romanesque or Gothic arches, so I cannot help begging the traveler, along with his smattering of architecture to bring a little liberality toward a faith different perhaps from his own, a little openness of mind. To one who goes to Spain in the holier-than-thou attitude, she is dumb and repellent,—she who can be so eloquent!

In each of her cities is a cathedral built when faith was gloriously generous and untamable, and in them one feels, unless blinded by prejudices of early environment or birth, that here indeed man is bowed in the humble self-abasement of worship, here is not only æsthetic beauty but a burning soul; the incense, the lights, the inherited lavish wealth speak with the spirituality of symbols, of ritual, that utterance of the soul older than hymns or voiced prayer.

This record of the journey through Spain will be called too partial, and yet I started without the slightest intention of liking or praising her. A month before going to Spain, on reading in the Bodleian Library certain accounts of St. Teresa, about whom I had but vague ideas, I exclaimed in distress, "What a morbid mind!" I went far from sympathetic, but bit by bit my prejudices dropped away. With the cant and smug self-conceit of northern superiority, I expected among other jars a shock to my religious belief. And after eight months I left Spain with the conviction that magnificently faulty though she is with her bull-fights, a venal government, and city loafers, she can give us lessons in mystic spirituality, in an unpretentious charity, in heroic endurance, in a very practical not theoretic democracy.

ESPAÑA LA HEROICA

Deep learned are the poor in many ways,
Their hearts are mellowed by sweet human pain,
And she has learned the lesson of the waifs,
This sadly-ravaged, stern, soul-moving Spain!

Rugged and wild, wind-swept, and bleak, and drear,
She has a ruined splendor all her own,
It seizes even while you ask in fear
The reason man should choose this waste for home.

Her cities rise, ascetic, lofty, proud,
Forever haunted by high souls that dare,
And from her wondrous churches rings aloud
A heaven-storming radiance of prayer;

With psalm, with dance, with ecstasy's white thrill,
Her mystics dared to lose themselves in God,
Theirs was unflinching faith, fierce, varonil,
A force as true to nature as the sod.

Reward must come: perhaps from her to-day
May spring the needed saint, to think, to feel,
To grope triumphantly, to point the way
To altars where both Faith and Science kneel.

Upon her ashy mountain height she stands,
Eager to step into the forward strife,
Her eyes are wide with hope, outstretched her hands
To meet the promise of new coursing life:

Steadfast her cities to the desert face,
Snow mountains loom across the silent plain:
Take courage, O exalted tragic race!
Courage! Christ's always faithful grand old Spain!

Castile, 1908.

IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: LOYOLA

"The only happy people in the world are the good man, the sage, and the saint; but the saint is happier than either of the others, so much is man by his nature formed for sanctity."—Joubert.

"Whoever has been in the land of the Basques wishes to return to it; it is a blessed land."—Victor Hugo.

THE Basque is still one of the sturdy untouched peoples of the earth; they make still the unmixed aborigines of Spain. Their difficult dialect remains a perplexity to the etymologist, some believe it to be of Tartar origin. They themselves claim to be the oldest race in Europe and that their language came to Spain before the confusion of tongues at Babel. They derive their name from a Basque phrase meaning "We are enough," that fittingly describes their character of self-sufficiency; the mere fact of being born in the province confers nobility. Life for centuries in the isolated valleys that never were conquered by Moor or foreign invader has bred in the Basque a passionate independence. He would never join with the neighboring kingdoms of Navarre and León until his special privileges were ratified; and though these privileges were the important ones of exemption from taxes and military service, he succeeded in keeping them intact until his sympathies with the Pretenders in the Carlist wars lost him his ancient rights. To-day the Basques must pay taxes and serve in the army like the rest of Spain, but their soldiers are usually employed in the customs, or as aids to the local police. Their red cap, like the French béret, and brilliant red trousers are a familiar sight among the valleys.

Of the three Basque provinces with their 600,000 people, the smallest, Guipúzcoa, is a good epitome of national characteristics. The sinuous valleys now serve as the passageway for the rushing mountain river, now spread out into a plain where the villages are set. Each town has its shady alameda, its plaza, and a court for playing pelota, a kind of tennis, the game of the province. There are frequent casas solares,[1] or family manor houses; one of these I remember wedged in with its neighbors, in Azcoitia, unnoticed by the guide book, only by chance we looked up and found it looming above the narrow pavement; blackened with age and scarred as if crashed with blows of warring times, it was a speaking record of old Basque life. In any other country but Spain, the carelessly rich and unrecorded, such a fortress-house would be a lion in the district,—from this very unexpectedness Spanish travel is of unflagging charm. The strong primitive Guipúzcoans cling to their patriarchal customs. The men and boys sit before their doors making the cord soles used in peasants' shoes; the women in groups of twenty or more, wash clothes in the public trough or down by the river. The industry of all is unflagging. The roads are among the best built in Spain, along them go creaking carts, each wheel made of a solid block of wood bound in iron and emitting a prolonged agonizing squeak. The cream-colored oxen that drag them have their yokes covered with sheepskin, another century-old custom. The carts sometimes carry pigskins filled with wine, three legs in the air, and the unique casks are mended with a kind of pitch that lends a disagreeable flavor to the wine, but these highlanders will not yield an old usage.

No sooner did we cross the Puente Internacional that connects France with its neighbors over the Bidassoa River—scene of historic meetings—than we found ourselves in the wooded Basque provinces of the northern Pyrenees. The country was fertile, the small farms cultivated with activity; on the hills were heavily-laden chestnut trees, in the valleys, orchards: we often passed trainloads of red apples carried unpacked in the open cars like coal. Not far from the frontier the train skirted what appeared to be an inland lake surrounded by hills, when suddenly I noticed an ocean steamer and some fishing smacks lying at anchor, and looking closer I saw that a narrow passage led through the hills to the ocean breaking outside,—another of Spain's unheralded effects. This was the beautiful inland Bay of Pasajes, the port from which young Lafayette sailed for America.

At San Sebastián, the most fashionable summer resort in Spain, and still gay with Madrid people, for the season holds till October, we saw the first bull-ring, a circular building of red and yellow brick in the Moorish style. To find a plaza de toros here in the north was disconcerting. Spain's national game has withstood the will of kings, Papal bulls, the dislike of a large proportion of the Spanish people who petitioned the Cortes in 1878 for its abolishment, and the odium of foreign races. Until this debased cosa de España is done away with it will remain a stumbling block to even the most sympathetic of travelers.

At Irún, the frontier town behind us, we had taken our tickets for Zumárraga, two hours away. There we were to leave the railway and drive into the valleys to Loyola, where in an old castle the hidalgo vizcaíno, Don Iñigo de Loyola, was born. Our guide book gave but the slightest information. It was raining drearily. With trepidation and sinking hearts we looked out at Zumárraga as the train drew near. Would this, the first night in Spain, cold and wet, be spent in some miserable tavern in a town of a thousand inhabitants, and perhaps the next morning would a rickety diligence take us up the valley? We stepped from the train reluctantly; at the last minute we were tempted to turn back. But a porter had seized our valises, and muttering something incomprehensible about Loyola and an automobile hurried us through the station. And there, beyond, stood the wonderful thing, sign manual of modern comfort—a great red automobile with a gallant chauffeur! We sat down on our luggage and burst into a hearty laugh. It began to dawn on us that perhaps the tour of Spain was not going to be the series of hardships and privations we anticipated.

For the sum of three pesetas each (fifty-four cents) we were whirled up the winding valley. The mountains rose precipitously from the road and its accompanying river, reminding me of the valley in the Pistoiese Apennines that leads down to the Bagni di Lucca. In the motor diligence with us were a few courteous Basques; an elderly architect, with the finely-chiseled features of the country, pointed out a sight here and there, among others the birthplace and statue of Legazpi, conqueror of the Philippines. I think he took us for countrywomen of his young queen, and, trying to emulate his politeness, we were silent as to our nationality; later we discovered that this was quite unnecessary, for there is not the slightest prejudice in Spain against the United States. We passed a building by the river and were told it was an electric power-house; almost every part of the country is now lighted by electricity. "You are very up-to-date!" we exclaimed. He replied by a shrug of delighted self-depreciation, a proud smile of conscious superiority aping the humble, not out of place in a Basque whose mysterious language Adam spoke, so ancient and difficult a tongue that the devil who once tried to learn it, they say, had to give up in despair. Our opposite neighbors in the diligence, countrymen whose loss of teeth made them appear aged, sought also to show some courtesy. Each wayside shrine was named with glistening eyes,—St. Anthony; the hermitage on the hill above, St. Augustine; here, St. John. One began to understand religion was no mere Sunday morning service with this people.

After six miles the valley opened out and we came to Azcoitia, a town of some five thousand inhabitants where is manufactured the bóina, the typical cap of the province. The automobile went slowly through the narrow cobbled streets, under the high houses and the cliff-like church, then sped over two miles of a beautiful valley, with mountain rising behind mountain in the evening light, and at length we reached Loyola.

Here one of the great discoverers of new strength, of untried powers in the human soul, one of the holiest men of Christendom, saw the light in 1491, the year before the discovery of America: in the life of St. Ignatius are several coincidental dates to give us pause. Surely it was to these peaceful Basque hills that his thoughts turned when, a knight in the worldly court that surrounded Ferdinand and his second wife Germaine de Foix, Ignatius in gazing at the stars would feel with sudden potency the pettiness of man's grandeur, and during his religious life, when he craved at the sunset hour to be alone to meditate, he must have recalled this lovely valley of his birth. With emotion I saw in the distance the huge quadrangle of the convent that now surrounds the Santa Casa: the thought of what this spot has given to the world, of the thousands of chosen souls linked to-day by one will to work for good in every land, can well make Loyola a place to stir the heart.

At a little past six we left the automobile which was to run farther up the valley, and a porter from the inn led us through the park the Jesuits have planted for the people. The Hospedería de Loyola was a large building with a porticoed entrance at right angles to the convent, more like a monastery than a hotel, with polished staircase and corridors, neat bare rooms, and a long white refectory. The table was excellent, one course followed another at the one o'clock luncheon and the eight o'clock dinner. There was fresh fish from San Sebastián (to which daily another motor diligence ran), there were home-made preserves, and we had our first taste of the universal garbanzos[2] of Spain, a chickpea shaped like a ram's head. The waitress, the first of many Carmens and Dolores, was a wonderful old woman who grew so intent on teaching us her language that she would insistently repeat the name of each dish she passed. She managed to convey to us by pantomime, for our Spanish as yet was of the meagerest, that there were eight ladies from Madrid in the hotel, living upstairs in retirement as they were making a Retreat. They had come last Saturday;—talk, talk, talk,—and the animated little woman gesticulated to show. Then the Retreat began,—did we know what "the Exercises" were? Off she walked with bowed head and downcast eyes. So it would be all week. The next Monday we should see them, they would come to table with us, and it would be talk, talk, talk again. During the week we occasionally saw a lady in black, her head covered with a veil, cross from the hotel to the Santa Casa where the meditations were held. In the convent the Jesuits were conducting another Retreat attended by fifty men from different Spanish cities: these lived in the seminary with the priests.

At table with us were some Spanish people of a kind the tourist does not usually meet. One of them, a deeply religious man from Barcelona, on his first visit to the Santa Casa, following the example of St. Francis Borgia, knelt to kiss the floor of the room in which the patron of the Basques was born. Another, an elderly woman fond of lace and jewels, and probably longing for the gayeties of San Sebastián, was waiting in this quiet spot while her daughter made the Retreat. When the eight days were ended we met this daughter, a beautiful girl with the charm of manner and quickness of intelligence that we found as a rule among Spanish women. The afternoon the two Retreats closed was a pleasant sight. The valley was fragrant from the rain, on the mountains the chalets stood out strangely near in the clear air. Carriages and touring-cars rolled up, pretty wives to fetch their husbands to claim their wives. All were happy and natural, but one felt around one the atmosphere of the higher things of life, an exaltation that only religion can give. Religion is ineradicably woven into the every-day life of this race: a Spaniard is half mystic by inheritance. The power to understand the spiritual is not the gift of a few but of all. It gives to the peasant woman, to the uncouth lad serving Mass, an intelligence above themselves.[3] Before the late dinner that last evening in Loyola, a tall Spanish woman with her four daughters automobiled over from San Sebastián; she came to join her husband who had been following the "Exercises." He now sat with us at table, a man of the grave dignity and fine presence we were later to meet frequently. That night when passing through the corridors we heard the sounds of prayer in their rooms, the wife and children making the responses to the man's deeper voice.

The convent of Loyola is the center of civilization for the countryside. All day there is a ceaseless come and go to the church, or to the Santa Casa for silent prayer. At one each day troops of children go to the door of the convent with baskets and tins, and food is given them to carry to the aged and decrepit of the town. An hour later some dozens of lads in blue smock and bóina, playing their ceaseless pelota, flock into the building for a half hour of doctrina. Then at three the young novices come out gayly for their ramble over the mountains and as they pass before the church each instantly removes his hat as walking they repeat together a prayer. Happy those whose formative years are passed in hardy discipline among these uncontaminated Basque hills! The peasants of the valley, when the bell sounds the hours, pause to remove their caps in salutation. Every morning they cross the fields from Azpeitia on the raised path beside the river, or they come from Azcoitia, two miles down the valley, to attend the morning services. No one who has not seen a Spanish priest's attitude of devotion can understand its appealing beauty. These Jesuits and their attendant young novices (there are about two hundred students in the seminary) approach the altar with solemn reverence, without a trace of self-consciousness, and slowly and beautifully say the Mass. "The Jesuit seems to love God from pure inclination, out of admiration, gratitude, tenderness, for the pleasure of loving Him," wrote that subtle critic, Joubert: "In their books of devotion you find joy because with them nature and religion go hand in hand." A Basque congregation is worthy of such ministers. All kneel without bench or chair, the men on folded handkerchiefs, the women on the circular straw mats scattered over the pavement. We were fortunate enough to attend a late Benediction, not a customary service in Spain as we found later. The thrilled exaltation of the singing in which all joined, the aged as well as children, is impossible to describe. It was a triumphant full-hearted adoration trying to voice the inexpressible; the organ ran riot, strained to its utmost, to accompany the ecstatic singing.

Every Sunday the peasants drive in from the mountains to attend the afternoon service, and after it they stand to chat for a placid hour on the wide steps of the church. Arm in arm the young girls stroll up and down in the park before the convent. I looked on at this scene of contentment that told of frugal, upright living, with the sad thought of France deprived of such wholesome beauty, of the peasants round the Grande-Chartreuse, poverty-stricken and desolate since the industrial monastery was closed. Happily for the future of Spain, she has at hand a neighbor to give her the lesson in time.

The convent of Loyola was built by the Austrian wife of Philip IV to enclose and preserve the Santa Casa, and it was by her presented to the Jesuits. The church whose dome overtops the convent is in imitation of the Pantheon. Unfortunately, as are most Jesuit churches in Europe, it was erected in a bad period, and overloaded with ornament. The Company of Jesus was not founded until the golden age of architecture was well past; Churriguera, archmaster of bad taste, was in vogue when they built. But at Loyola if the twisted pillars of decorated marble are hideous, the ample flowing staircase that leads to the church is a beautiful feature, reminiscent of Italian villas.

The soul of the valley is naturally the Santa Casa itself, the casa solar of the saint's fore-fathers. The lower story is of rough-hewn stone, and once the whole building was the same, but a jealous king leveled the fortress-houses of the Basque nobles and the upper stories were rebuilt in ancient brick. Above the entrance door the arms of the family are carved, two wolves and a pot. The tradition is that the knights of Loyola were so generous to their retainers that even the wolves came to share their hospitality. In many of the rooms daily Masses are said; the four stories have been inlaid with mosaic, carved wood, and gold leaf, the gifts of devotees of the Basque patron. One room is pointed out as the saint's before his conversion, another as the one in which St. Francis Borgia said his first Mass, giving up a brilliant career, as viceroy, admiral, Duke of Gandía by inheritance, favorite of Charles V, to consecrate himself to the service of the altar. At this memorable Mass he gave communion to one of his sons, married to an inheritor of the Santa Casa, a niece of St. Ignatius. So many were the communicants another day that the Mass lasted from nine to three. Such rare instances of Christian perfection make the ancient house a chosen spot.

The story of St. Ignatius' life is told throughout his casa solar. On the staircase is a window showing him as a courtier. He was skilled in knightly exercises, fond of the saddle and equally fond of rich attire: good-looking, high-spirited, truthful, and brave, he was a favorite with his soldiers. The scene of his wounding at the siege of Pamplona is given; he lies on the ground with his leg shattered. A long year of convalescence followed, and we see him reading the books that wrought his marvelous change of heart. He sought the monastery of Montserrat, above Barcelona, to beg counsel of a learned man concerning the vocation he felt within him. His military training made him dream of forming a spiritual knighthood to battle for the salvation of souls: "Company of Jesus" is a military term. At Montserrat he performed the vigil of the armor, like a true knight watching till dawn before the altar; then exchanging his fine robes with a beggar he went forth, "el pobre ignoto peregrin." In a cave of Manresa he lived in seclusion and prayer, verifying on himself in agony of spirit the knowledge which was later to guide the troubled souls of others who sought light. "His experience in this solitude was an epitome of the psychology of the saints; and it smote him all the more intimately because he was utterly without foreknowledge of the spiritual life, and fought out his fight alone, like the first Fathers of the Desert." In the cave of Manresa was forged his Excalibur (to use again the vivid phrase of Francis Thompson, own brother to Crashaw in his flashes of celestial intuition), there originated the "Spiritual Exercises," the work used to-day in the Retreats. "It has converted more souls to God," wrote St. Francis de Sales, "than it contains letters."

Eighteen years were to pass before St. Ignatius founded his Order. They were years filled with wanderings in Spain and Europe, a student at universities, a humble but joyous pilgrim to Jerusalem. One day while he was reading the eighteenth chapter of St. Luke the words, "And they understood none of these things" brought before him with sudden force the realization of his own untrained mind, the fact that he must be educated himself before he could help others. So at thirty this remarkable man began his scholastic studies in Barcelona, in Cardinal Ximenez's famous university of Alcalá, in Salamanca. One day, in the streets of Alcalá, as he was led to prison on a false accusation, the proud young grandee of Gandía passed him. This was the first sight Francis Borgia had of the man who later was to lead his life. Then followed some years of study in Paris. 1530 found him in London at the time of the agitation of Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, again a coincidence in Ignatius' life that he should visit at this critical moment the land soon to desert a church for which he was destined to raise so powerful a defense. There was another notable Spaniard in England then, not a humble summer student begging his way like the Basque hidalgo, but a scholar of Corpus Christi College, distinguished and lauded, to attend whose lectures the King and Queen used sometimes to spend a few days in Oxford. This was Juan Luis de Vives, born in the great year 1492, the precursor of Bacon and Descartes, a man of such vast erudition and impartial judgment that he has been called with Erasmus and the French prodigy, Budé, the intellect of his century. Vives stood forth courageously as defender of his country-woman when the divorce question arose; he was imprisoned for a short time, forfeited his position and pension, and finally left England altogether.

Loyola now took his degree as Master of Arts in Paris, and gathering round him some young men of earnest life—among them the future apostle and martyr in the East, St. Francis Xavier from Navarre—the memorable band of seven students made the vows of poverty and chastity in the crypt of a church on Montmartre on the Feast of the Assumption, 1534. Thirty years later the remembrance of that hour made one of the seven, Rodríguez, feel his heart swell with ineffable consolation. Literally these ardent souls fulfilled the letter of the Gospel for the way of perfection: "If thou wilt be perfect go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor." "If any man will come after me let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me." "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." Their founder with superhuman perspicacity prayed it might be so. The world's hate is their alembic of purification.

Ignatius returned to Spain to arrange with Xavier's family—he also was of the northern mountain race of Spain—and with the kindred of three others of his followers. He crossed the Pyrenees by footpaths, and descending to his own valley of Loyola preached down by the river in Azpeitia. Later in Italy the band of Montmartre met again, working in hospitals, preaching, and converting souls to God. It was in Venice, many years after his wounding at Pamplona, that Ignatius Loyola was at length ordained priest, and in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore said his first Mass. When the projects of the small band were submitted to the Pope, he had the inspired wisdom to discern in humble beginnings a future great movement and exclaimed: "Digitus Dei est hic!"—truly the finger of God. The new Order approved, Loyola was elected its general; like a military company, the first law was the unhesitating obedience of the soldier to his leader, the unbreakable power that lies in many working as one. The Compañía spread over the world, reforming monasteries, giving help to the poor, persuading the rich to purer lives, reconciling husbands and wives. Within a few years Francis Borgia gave up his dukedom to join them, and his accession brought to the Order many Spaniards of high rank. The founder continued to live in Italy between Rome at the Gesù and Tivoli: he died in Rome in 1556.

In the Santa Casa we followed this remarkable life in scene after scene. There is a touching picture of the grown man at school among lads half his age, of the crypt of Montmartre, and of the final scene in Rome. His face was said by St. Philip Neri to have shone with compelling personality. In speech he was grave and admirable, a never-tiring student of the Bible; that, and the "Imitation of Christ" were the only books he much valued. "To see Father Ignatius was like reading a chapter of the 'Imitation,'" they used to say of him.

We lingered for some days in the beautiful Basque valley, following the winding paths among the mountains, loitering in the two little towns near by in the pleasant discovery of rare old windows and portals. Most of the houses had a picture of the Saviour on the entrance door. Each new-born child is brought to the parish church of Azpeitia where St. Ignatius was baptized, and each boy is called by his name, though only the eldest in a family has the privilege of using it. The saint's hymn is the national hymn of the Basques.

It was a raw autumn morning when we left Loyola. The light was just filling the valleys as we passed the sweeping steps of the church up which the peasants were mounting to beg a blessing on their working hours. The influence of their loved patron is as vivid as if he had lived but yesterday, so truly can one human mind, touched by divine grace, with no thought of self, in sublime earnestness, rouse mankind to shake off its apathy, to aspire to the highest. If only another such knight might arise to-day to fight the modern battle of Christianity!

BURGOS AND THE CID

"The epochs in which faith prevails are the marked epochs of human history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful."—GOETHE.

PASSING through the fertile Basque valleys, the train mounts the Pyrenees by a series of skillfully-engineered tunnels. This natural barrier between France and Spain, is far from being the straight rampart of school geographies. It is a wide expanse of ramifying hills and intricate valleys, a jumble of mountains that explains why Spain remained isolated from northern Europe until the days of the railway.

When we reached the crest of this watershed between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, we had a noble view of the villages far beneath. Around us was a strange outcrop of white rock, and the descent to Vitoria was barren too: with every mile the scene grew bleaker till the rustling woods of the Basque valleys behind seemed a dream.

Beyond Miranda, the first town of old Castile, the desolate scene appeared in its full awfulness. The plain lay like brown dunes of sand, "as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy." It was indeed the haunting landscape of "Childe Roland." Passing over this wide stretch, the train again mounted, this time not to cross another range of hills, but to climb to the great truncated mountain which forms the center of Spain. Three-fourths of the area of this imagined orange-laden land is this tragic central plateau, comprising Old and New Castile, León, and Estremadura. Most of the historic cities are on this bleak upland, almost 3,000 feet above the sea, wind-swept, wintry, and made still colder by the snow mountains that cross it from east to west. Riding for days through the monotonous scene you begin to wonder not that Spain should be poor, but rather that she, an agricultural land, should have made so good a fight against such heavy odds. The guide books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the fringe of the Peninsula.

It was early October when we mounted the Pass of Pancorbo. A fierce wind was blowing. It suddenly blew open the door of our compartment, and flung it back, smashing the glass. It was impossible to draw it to in the fierce gale, and this little incident added to the desolation round us. We looked down through the open door on the white road of the Pass, over which Napoleon's armies poured a hundred years before to plunder Spain with ruthless cruelty, and yet, so hidden is the guidance of things, that seeming disaster waked the country from its long abasement.

Having reached the great central steppes, the same melancholy scene continued. The land was scorched and calcined. Everything was a dull brown. Villages were undistinguishable from the plain, and the churches from the villages; man, his ass, and his dog, were all the same dull tone. Even the brown deserts of Egypt failed to give me as powerful a sensation of the forsaken. The plateau was treeless, except for an occasional wind-threshed poplar, and an isolated moth-eaten poplar can be the final touch of desolation. At times, miles from any village, a solitary figure guided his oxen and plow in a stony field, or silhouetted against the sky a tandem of five or six mules slowly crawled along. Since the villages are far apart, each worker must leave his home long before dawn to reach his distant field, and after sunset plod back patiently to the aldea.

Forlorn as it all appeared one saw that every inch of the soil was under cultivation. The peasants are as attached to their cheerless tract, which has its one hour of green bloom in the spring, as are the Basques to their beautiful valleys. The fields are passed from father to son, and are acquired with the same zest as are teeming English farms; a stern soil and still sterner climate has made a peasantry full of grit and courage. Hardy and undepressed they gathered round the train with pleasant greetings, for the long pauses in the stations are moments of sociability from one end of Spain to another. The sad landscape continued up to Burgos, one might say to its very gates if it were not that the townspeople have planted avenues of trees near the city.

As we approached we had a splendid view of the Cathedral towers dominating the town. There was something magnificent in the souls of the old builders who made a temple such as this in the midst of a desert, as if they defied the arid desolation to conquer their soaring faith. The great structure rose doubly impressive from the juxtaposition of richness and sterility, of the spirit's triumph over the material that makes Burgos as impressive in its way as Toledo with its more imposing setting.

"Nuestro país es el país de las anomalías" says the critic De Larra, and the first step in Spain strikes this note. She is a land of violent contrasts; level plain and broken sierra, elysian garden of Andalusia and tractless wastes of Castile, frosty Burgos and sunny Seville. She is the home of the hidalgo and home of the strongest existing democracy between man and man, only equaled by early Rome. It was in Burgos we first noticed what we later saw frequently, the labrador who drove his master's carriage, enter the inn with him and sit at the same table to eat, master and man alike in their dignity. She has a peasantry beyond praise for its virile industry, and she has a class of city loafers the idlest that ever encumbered a plaza. Cradle of exalted mystics and mother of realistic painters, this land of racy personalities never allows one's interest to flag.

We spent a week in Burgos, and not once did the sun shine. The cold was piercing. At the corner of every street a biting wind seized and buffeted one about; besides being on a mountain, there are still higher mountains near, and snow has been known to fall in June. Wind and cold, however, were soon forgotten once inside the Cathedral. Our first visit was within the hour of arrival, at dusk when details were hidden. The great temple rose around us mysterious and awe inspiring. Though almost with the first breath of wonder came a sense of bewilderment,—what was this heavy wall rising some thirty feet in the center of the church, that hid the altar and blocked up the nave so that only an encircling aisle was left free? So confusing was it I could not at first tell by what door we had entered, where was the east, where was the west end?

Books of travel all tell of this placing of the choir, or coro, in the nave of Spanish cathedrals, but one can read them and imagine nothing like the reality. I had pictured an open platform running down the center of the church, whereas high walls are built round the coro as well as round the capilla mayor, thus making a smaller church within a larger one. Wherever the inner church opens on the other, they have placed a towering metal screen called a reja. A narrow passageway, fenced by an open rail, usually runs from the altar enclosure to the coro, and the people gather close to this, under the transept-crossing tower; thus, practically, the priest at the altar and the canons chanting in the choir are separated by the congregation. It is hard to make the picture clear. I feel that no explanation can prevent this arrangement of Spanish cathedrals coming as a surprise to the traveler.

The evening of our first visit, we wandered round in the dusk bewildered by the blocking coro, and at length entered the chapel of St. Anne, where a service was going on. The side chapels of Burgos are churches in themselves, they often belong to private individuals, this of St. Anne being, for instance, the property of the Duke of Abrantes. It was now crowded with people of all kinds,—officers in uniform, a few ladies in hats but the bulk of the women in black veils. From a small balcony on one side the litany was sung.

Before the altar was what appeared to be a black covered bier, so I thought we must have stumbled on some special service for the dead. This would account for so large a gathering on a weekday, for at first one fails to grasp the every-day religious attitude of the Spaniard. Looking closer at the bier before the lighted altar a human figure was outlined under the dark pall. How displeasing, I thought, not to use a coffin!

Suddenly the head of this recumbent figure unmistakably moved. With a shiver I looked round me. No one appeared to notice what was to me so terrifying, yet they were gazing over the bier at the altar. Strange visions floated through my imagination, made up of memories of Charles V's funeral before his death, and of contorted accounts of Spain and her ways. Perhaps it was not an unusual custom here, thus morbidly to sample beforehand one's own funeral service. Then, as the litanies continued, now the solo from the choir, now the full-voiced responses of the people, I realized these sweet evening melodies could hardly be the dirges of a burial. The supposition of a living corpse was too bizarre in the midst of this composed crowd.

I fastened my eyes on the round head of the bier, and again it moved, but this time so thoroughly moved that the mystery was solved. With a breath of relief I knew this was indeed a quiet evening service and what had seemed a bier was merely one of the many marble tombs before the altars of old churches, covered over with a dark mantle as they sometimes are. What I had imagined the round head of a corpse, or future corpse, was the veil-draped head of a living woman, seated on a higher chair than usual between the tomb and the lighted altar. So ended my first and only romantic episode in Spain.

I mention it as showing with what vague notions of terror the average English-speaking tourist enters this harmless land. He comes full of the prejudices inherited from the days of the Invincible Armada, when a Spaniard was to an Englishman his satanic majesty incarnate, and this in an age of which Froude himself, the enthusiastic chronicler of Drake, says: "Perhaps nowhere on earth was there a finer average of distinguished and cultivated society than in the provincial Castilian cities."

Strange how tenaciously we cling to disproved ideas, I thought, as the next day we examined the beautiful tomb of Bishop Acuña which had caused my fright. Spain is as safe to-day as any civilized country. Yet we met two Californian ladies traveling with pistols, about as needed here as firearms in the lanes of Surrey or the brigand-infested hills of Massachusetts. Little by little the traveler who keeps an open mind learns that the cruel and morbid Spaniard of the popular fancy has no existence except in his imagination. Unfortunately there will always be some travelers here who see the heads on death biers move and carry away the gruesome tale to swell the old prejudices, who will not wait long enough nor look deep enough to find their living corpse a noble old bishop in alabaster who has lain in peace some hundred years.

Every day of our week in Burgos found us several times in the Cathedral. I used to arrive for the High Mass at nine, though before daybreak until nine there had been many services in the side chapels; it is still the custom with most Spaniards to kneel in recollection every morning. Strangely enough, I soon grew reconciled to the clumsy coro. It enabled the people to approach close to the altar in a peaceful secluded spot. Here at Burgos one can kneel on the altar's very steps, beside the big sanctuary lamp and the silver candlesticks that rise higher than a man. The onlooking tourist, who often spoils Italian churches for those who go to pray not to sightsee, in Spain is not permitted his ill-timed liberty. He can wander freely through the outer cathedral, but during the Mass, he cannot enter this inner temple unless he conforms to the accustomed usages. All must kneel at the moment of the Elevation or else leave. The lesson was taught us soon, for when the first morning in Burgos a lady near by in the chancel inadvertently began to read in her guide book, a verger in red plush cloak, bearing an authoritative silver staff, approached, and kindly but firmly showed her out.

The richness of Spanish cathedrals at first is overpowering, that they are too rich and overloaded is a criticism which is quite justified, but it is the profusion of strength, not the cluttering of details to hide a weak understructure; it is a profusion that speaks the nation's character, her burning faith, her oriental generosity. In antique silver, jewels, vestments, wood carvings, tombs, they are veritable museums of art. A Spaniard has given generously to the church in all ages. Though even when prosperous he is content to live with a frugal simplicity hardly understood by our luxury-loving time, it is a law of his nature that his ideas of grandeur and of beauty should find their free expression in the House of God. I often had the sensation that the beggar kneeling in these truly royal churches felt himself a part of them; his own poor home was but one side of the picture, he could claim this other home as well.

It was at Burgos we first met in the churches minor features that are essentially Spanish. The organ pipes flare out like trumpets; the reredos, or retablo, made up of carved wood panels, rises sometimes to a hundred feet behind the altar; and there is the metal-work of the great screens or rejas. This last was an art de propia España, and her churches would lack half their sublimity without the massive fretwork of iron or brass that shuts in the richly-decked altars. At Burgos we especially noticed the reja of the Condestable chapel, with graceful wind-blown figures at the top. In the choir, round the lectern were piled ancient psalm books, some of them three feet high, their calfskin covers strengthened with metal claspings. The naturalness with which these priceless books are treated shows how happily bound to preceding generations, with no break of revolution and destruction, is this old land. This thought of the antiquity of her usages is a very potent one to every Spaniard, and the stranger too finds the purple robed canons chanting in their choir-stalls more impressive because for six hundred years in this same Cathedral they have intoned daily these same psalms.

Another national talent is her carving in wood. The choir-stalls here were a revelation. The masters of this art, Berruguete, Vigarni, Montañés, may not be known to the rest of Europe, but they are locally very famous. Their intense realism appeals to the popular mind, and though in later centuries this realism degenerated into the bad taste of hanging the statues with robes, enough of earlier art remains to make one overlook these lapses. Should not a poet be judged by his best lines? Why must an image in wig and jewels blind one to the remarkable carved statues found side by side with it?

The wood carvers of Spain speak the same language of sincerity as the mystic writers, and a knowledge of Luis de León, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, makes one better appreciate the sculptors. Not that they too are mystical. They do not soar so high. It is only a few chosen souls here and there through the centuries who can walk that perilous path, and probably they can express themselves only through the more intangible medium of speech. But these wood carvings are the fruit of men who understood the mystics and who worked in a like spirit of intense faith. I should say it was not in her paintings that the religious essence of this race was to be found, not in the somewhat posing monks of Zurbaran, nor in the gentle religiosity of Murillo's madonnas. Though a master of color, Murillo is too often akin in spirit to Carlo Dolce and Sassoferrato. It is the fashion to call these typically religious painters. But in the carved biblical scenes of retablo and sillería is shown more truly the inner spiritual intelligence of the serious Spaniard. Velasquez spoke for the reality of his time, its chivalry, its material force; and these masters of wood carving in more halting speech expressed the religious aspirations of the people. They worked with a realism that is often painful, yet the intensity with which they felt the scenes they depicted links them with the mystics. The wood carvings have not had justice done them, perhaps because they are for the most part painted, which certainly detracts from them. Fortunately choir-stalls were left in the natural wood, those at Burgos being a rich dark walnut with the polish that time only can give. We spent many happy hours studying this twelve years' work of the sculptor Vigarni. The seats are carved with grotesque, fantastic creatures, half man, half beast, the arm of the chair now made by an acrobat bent double backward, now by a monster with a tail in his mouth, or some bat-like demon. There is a frieze of Old Testament scenes too high to be well seen, but below them the New Testament story is told from the Annunciation to the Doubting Thomas after the Resurrection. Though the simpleness of earlier times is shown in the miniature devil that passes from the possessed man's lips, and in Mary Magdalene's dropped jaw of surprise when she meets her risen Lord, these carvings are not merely curious, they are soul-touching and beautiful. The type of face is the high-boned one the Spaniard prefers, with well-cut brows and aquiline nose. Notice the solemn beauty of Christ's face in the qui ci ne pecato. In the panel, the blind cured, seldom has the expression of absolute faith been better rendered than in the raised face of the old blind man. Do not pass by the Garden of Gethsemane with the three Apostles lying heavily asleep, the human shrug of the shoulder and outstretched hand of the Master: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?"

While the Cathedral of Burgos shows much florid later work, especially the central tower and that of the Condestable chapel, under the too ornate additions the ancient purer church is plainly perceptible. It belonged to the Gothic of the Northern-France type, for pilgrims to her shrines and to fight in her crusades, brought foreign ideas to Spain at so early a date that it is useless to speculate about what a native architecture might have been.

Some of the smaller churches of the town are worth visiting, such as San Nicolás, with a stone retablo which is a tour de force of handicraft; San Lermes, and facing it the hospital of San Juan, where we first met the escutcheoned doorways of Spain, which, if kept within bounds, are arrogantly effective and national. Throughout the city are good examples of domestic architecture, such as the Casa del Cordón, built by the Constable of Castile, Don Pedro Fernández de Velasco, whose sumptuous tomb lies in the center of the Condestable Chapel, and whose pride as a Castilian speaks in the family proverb:

"Antes que Dios fuese Dios,
O que el sol iluminaba los peñascos,
Ya era noble la casa de los Vélascos."

"Before God was God, or the sun shone upon the rocks, already was the house of Velasco noble."[4] Above the entrance to his house the girdle of St. Francis connects his arms with those of his wife, as proud as he, for she was a Mendoza. One rainy afternoon we spent in the Museo over the Gateway of Santa María, and there, step by step, traced Spain's art history,—statues from the former Roman city of Clunia in this province, a remarkable enameled altar-front of the Byzantine period, Romanesque and Gothic relics from the monasteries out on the plains, a Moorish arch found in situ, and tombs of that transition time from Gothic to Renaissance which in Spain was so flourishing a phase of art.

Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world." Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book of Hours, in a natural attitude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk." The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his God, to his King, and to himself,—what better standards can you have?

Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard Cœur de Lion. Many ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine, with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on the rare occasions of a king's visit, when all who are able crowd in at the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many knights had performed the vigil of the armor—among others Edward I of England was knighted here—when a nun entered the coro, and in her trailing white robes bowed toward the altar—rather it was the slow courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess, Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain.

Burgos is the birthplace of the national hero, the Cid Campeador, "God's scourge upon the Moor." This contemporary of William the Conqueror, whom the erudites of the eighteenth century tried in vain to prove a mythical character,[5] may be said to dominate Spanish literature. Spain's epic, the "Romancero del Cid," has made its hero the historic Cid for all time, just as Shakespeare's genius vitalized a Henry V. Don Roderick Díaz de Bivar was born under the castle hill of Burgos in 1026, some small monuments standing on the site of his casa solar. He was a champion of popular rights, generous, chivalrous, faithful ever to his wife Jimena, a true guerrilla warrior, like the men of his age, sometimes crafty and cruel. The Cid was every inch a man, as his fellow countrymen are eminently varonil, his hold on the heart of the people is secure. There are no poems in the world whose lines ring and clang more valiantly than the "Romancero." Here is untamed red blood and courage:

"With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low,
With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow,
All firm of hand and high of heart, they roll upon the foe.
And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out,
And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout,
'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for love of charity!
The Champion of Bivar is here—Ruy Díaz—I am he!'
Then bearing where Bermúez still maintains unequal fight
Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white;
Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow;
And when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go.
It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day;
The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay;
The pennons that went in snow-white came out a gory red;
The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead;
While Moors called on Mohammed, and 'St. James' the Christians cry."[6]

Wandering minstrels sang these chansons de gestes for centuries, till they were a very part of the nation. The wooing of Jimena is strong with the unconscious vigor of those times. The Cid had slain her father in combat:

"But when the fair Jimena came forth to plight her hand,
Rodrigo gazing on her, his face could not command;
He stood and blushed before her; then at the last said he,
'I slew thy sire, Jimena, but not in villany:
In no disguise I slew him, man against man I stood,
There was some wrong between us, and I did shed his blood.
I slew a man, I owe a man; fair lady, by God's grace,
An honored husband thou shalt have in thy dead father's place.'"

And to the end the free-lance warrior proved a gallant husband. The ballad of their wedding feast was often in my mind in the silent streets of Burgos.

"Within his hall of Burgos the king prepares the feast,
He makes his preparation for many a noble guest,
It is a joyful city, it is a gallant day,
'Tis the Campeador's wedding, and who will bide away?

They have scattered olive branches and rushes on the street,
And the ladies flung down garlands at the Campeador's feet,
With tapestry and broidery their balconies between,
To do his bridal honor, their walls the burghers screen.

They lead the bulls before them all covered o'er with trappings,
The little boys pursue them with hootings and with clappings,
The fool with cap and bladder upon his ass goes prancing
Amid troops of captive maidens with bells and cymbals dancing."[7]

The old poet must have written with his eye straight on his subject; those eleventh century urchins baiting the bulls are startlingly realistic. When the Cid died, at Valencia, in 1099, still called on the maps Valencia del Cid, he was placed in full armor on his battle horse, Bavieca, and brought to San Pedro de Cardeña, eight miles from Burgos. Thither Jimena retired, and on her death was laid with her husband. The faithful horse, famous in the "Romancero" as Jimena herself, was buried under a tree of the convent near his master. For the Cid had left word, "When you bury Bavieca, dig deep. For shameful thing were it that he should be eaten by curs who hath trod down so much currish flesh of Moors." To-day Bavieca's master does not lie in the quiet dignity of San Pedro. After various vicissitudes his remains are kept in a chest in the city hall of Burgos, not the most appropriate of sepulchers for a national hero.

On the last day of our stay in the old Gothic city, we climbed the hill from which it doubtless got its name, Burg, a fortified eminence. The castle where the Cid was married is a complete ruin, for when the French evacuated the fort in 1813 they blew it up. On every side stretched the level melancholy plain, and silhouetted against it was the elaborate stone lace-work of the Cathedral. For long I looked out on the remarkable landscape, so far from beautiful yet so thought arousing. Little by little I was learning how a race can be ascetic to its inmost core yet express itself in grandiose architecture; exalted in soul yet the most realistic people in Europe; serious and dignified, yet childlike in their zest of life. Here was man in his unsubtle vigor, not so liberal that he had no creed left, not so polished that he had lost the power of first wonder and emotion. Life was lived here, not analyzed and missed.

VALLADOLID

"They have no song the sedges dry
And still they sing,
It is within my heart they sing as I pass by,
Within my heart they touch a spring,
They wake a sigh,
There is but sound of sedges dry
In me they sing."

GEORGE MEREDITH.

FROM Burgos to Valladolid the monotonous Castile plain continued, unbroken by any hill and hardly a tree. Yet evening on the level steppes has a charm of its own. Like sunset at sea, nature has a free sweep of canvas on which to paint her pageant; details eliminated, the essential remains. One carries away many such memories from the silent plateau, till little by little the affection of the grave Castilian for his home is understood.

On leaving Burgos there had occurred an amusing station scene. The man at the ticket office told us we could not start till the following day, as the train, on the point of arriving, was already full. So in discouragement we turned back to the distant hotel. Half way there a messenger from the station overtook us to say they had telegraphed ahead that there would be a few seats in the second class. We returned in time to board the packed train, and since it was the express to Madrid the second class carriages were excellent. As was the custom all over Spain, the hotel bus at Valladolid was waiting, and drove us immediately to the inn, where we had the usual bare but clean rooms, and the usual well-cooked generous dinner: if the trains were to pick us up as they chose, at any rate we were not going to starve or be eaten alive.

It is well to have the first view of Valladolid by night as we did, under an early moon, for in the daytime it is modern, flat, and unpicturesque, a sharp contrast to Burgos. The moonlight soon tempted us out to explore the town. In the Plaza Mayor all was animation, an unbroken promenade of people under the arcades before the gay shops, officers in bright uniforms, and ladies in Parisian hats; it might have been any provincial city in Europe. Apart from this active lung of the town, the quiet streets were so deserted that our footsteps roused a startling echo. We passed under the huge fragment of the Cathedral, a nave only; the transepts stand roofless, and a new ruin is as depressing a thing as there is in life. The architect of the Escorial who designed this, Herrera, gave his name to the pseudo-classic style, "art made tongue-tied by authority," that followed the Plateresque abuse of ornament, just as his in turn was succeeded by the fantastic prancing art of Churriguera, again a reaction. An example of this last, the University, stood in the square near the Cathedral, and even the kindly moonlight could not soften the overladen meaningless mass; the cold severe lines of Herrera were dignified and regrettable in comparison. For me a Churrigueresque building is the ne plus ultra of bad taste in architecture, and Spain has a wealth of them. That man can raise a Santiago and a León, and some four hundred years later a San Isidro of Madrid, that the same race can carve a Pórtico de la Gloria and the Transparente of Toledo, show interesting possibilities of retrogression! Alas! we thought, after the strong old Gothic of Burgos, is Valladolid going to be just barren like its Cathedral and chaotic like its University? We went on in the moonlight and came to a white gleaming plaza where a church of the thirteenth century stood isolated, Santa María la Antigua, with a beautiful Lombard tower, and also that feature peculiar to Romanesque art in Spain, an outside cloister for the laity. This was decidedly better.

The next morning when we came to explore the town, though we found no Gothic, we had our first introduction to a phase of architecture which is confined to the Peninsula. It coincided with Isabella's reign, and was a characteristic outburst of its new wealth and conquests, appropriately efflorescent and grandiose, though if carried one step beyond it would be decadent. This short period is called Plateresque, from platero, silversmith, for its elaborate surface decoration of scrolls, medallions, and heraldic ornament is sublimated smith's work. It occurred during the transition from Gothic to Renaissance, so it combined itself with either one or the other of these styles. It may be dull to give these pedagogical details and yet, as I hinted, if one is to understand Spain, one must have some smattering of architecture. Valladolid is worth stopping to see on one's entrance to Spain, if it were only for the clear-cut summary it gives of the different schools, always excepting Gothic. As it and Salamanca were the two places where the silversmith's art flourished, so they are the two centers for the best Plateresque buildings. They happen to be, unfortunately, the two cities that suffered most from the French invasion. Their churches and colleges were pillaged and battered, and though in modern times they have been restored, the first touch of perfection, "the first fine careless rapture" can never be recaught.

Valladolid has three notable examples of Plateresque, San Pablo, San Gregorio, and the Colegio de Santa Cruz. If you have a weakness for the art of the builder this introduction to the rich and admirable expression of Spain at the zenith of her material power is an occasion. There is an excitement in coming on something original which has not been hackneyed by photograph. Thus, when I first entered the square where San Pablo's façade rises, I stood still in astonishment; I had never seen anything like this, and at first I could not tell if I liked it or not. Tier on tier soared the carved shields and crests, bizarre but nevertheless stately. Close by was the even stranger façade of San Gregorio, one vast crest with elaborate arabesques and statues. Being founded by the great primate of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, it was appropriate to meet here in the courtyard with some Mudéjar work, Christian and Moorish elements combined. It was in this convent that the Dominican, Bartolomé Las Casas, "Apostle of the Indians," spent the last twenty years of his energetic, troubled life, writing his history of the Colonies. He died at the advanced age of ninety-two, "A man who would have been remarkable in any age of the world," says Ticknor, "and who does not seem yet to have gathered in the full harvest of his honours." The third of the Plateresque buildings, well within Renaissance lines this last, the College of the Holy Cross founded by Cardinal Mendoza, now contains a grammar school, a library of some thousand volumes open to the public, and the Museum of the city.

On no account should the Museo be missed, for it holds a wonderful collection of wood carvings, an art which is to Spain what Italy's frescoes are to her: these statues were gathered chiefly from convents sacked by the French. Valladolid was personally associated with this national development, for most of the master-carvers lived at one time or another in the city. Spain's best sculptor, Berruguete, worked for years for the monks of San Benito, the retablo of whose church is now in detached statues in the museum. He had studied under Michael Angelo, and though he had a distinct personality of his own, he plainly showed Italian influence. His pupil, Esteban Jordán, lived here, also the exaggerated Juan de Juní, and a more famous master, Alonzo Cano, painter and architect too. Cano, who died a canon in Granada Cathedral, is said to have fled the town—his house is still pointed out—when accused of the murder of his wife, though later investigations have thrown doubt on the whole story. This irascible master, one of the warmest hearted of men underneath, taught drawing to the Don Baltasar Carlos whom Velasquez painted, and I fear the infante found him very cross at times. Velasquez and Cano were friends and must have talked over that charming little prince. Cano was indeed a character. When a corporation demurred at the price of a statue he had made for them he shattered the image with a blow; and on his death bed he could not bring himself to kiss an inartistic crucifix, saying, "Give me a plain cross that I may venerate Jesucristo as he is pictured in my own mind."

The room of coarsely-carved statues, formerly used in the Holy Week processions, should be passed with a glance, but the collection of smaller works deserves long study. The most beautiful group I thought was the Baptism in the Jordan by a later carver, Gregorio Hernández, of Galicia, who died in Valladolid in 1636. His art is not classic, indeed most Spanish sculptors cared little for the ideal perfection of the human body, their strength lay in the individual portrait, not in rendering a type. Hernández softened the crudity or the realist school to which he belonged by depicting nobility of face and bearing. The scene of the Jordan is a panel with the two chief figures life-sized in full relief. The Baptist, his well-modeled limbs strong from life in the desert, leans forward to pour the river water on the head of his Lord, with an expression of such vivid rapture and awe that it holds you spellbound. There is little in art that can surpass this in emotional sincerity. The story of the Gospel is told to its fullest possibility. What the sculptor felt in every fiber he has succeeded in making others feel, and though an expression so poignant may not be highest art, it justifies itself by its direct appeal to the human heart. It is told of Hernández that he never undertook a work till he had first prayed. He has here also a statue of St. Teresa, spoiled by the heavy paint, and a bust of St. Anne, successfully colored. Even if you are prepared to find the wood carvings painted it frets you; it almost spoils the statues, but it was the custom and must be accepted. "Es la costumbre" is a closing argument in a country whose link with the past has never been rudely broken.

If her remarkable wood carvings come as a surprise, so will some of the practical developments of this small progressive city. The hospital that looks out on the leafy park of the Magdalena is run in approved modern fashion. A brisk young doctor who spoke English, having learned from a friend in the English College here, showed us over the wards with legitimate pride. They radiated from a big central rotunda; on both sides of each ward were large windows and at the end of each a pretty altar. There were five hundred public beds, and private rooms were to be had for the sum of two dollars a week! The greeting between doctor and patients was a pleasant thing to see,—he chatted and joked with the children, and, as we left, stopped at the door to lift with real kindness an ill man who had just arrived in a gayly-painted country cart. The newcomer was a gentle-faced Castilian, whose sons had brought him in from the plains; as the stalwart boys carried the trembling old man I thought of another touching hospital scene. Perhaps Rab and his friends came to my mind because bounding round us on our visit to the hospital was a beautiful Scotch collie. "Laddie" was an unfamiliar sight on a Spanish street; he belonged to the English College and is a great pet of the seminarians.

In Valladolid are two foreign institutions: the Scotch college, founded by a Colonel Semple in 1627; and the English, which continues the foundation of St. Albans, and has relics of its name-saint of the third century. It was endowed in Spain by Sir Francis Englefield, who retired here after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Some forty English students are educated for the priesthood and return on their ordination for work in their native land. Naturally the great hour of this college was during the religious persecutions under Elizabeth, when it was death to be a priest in England. Twenty-seven from this one small group were executed. Their portraits hang along the cloisters: Cadwallader, Stark, Bell, Walpole, Weston, Sutheron,—each of the heroic band started from these quiet halls to meet a martyr's death.

Controversy is out of date, I hope, to-day. But there is such a thing as fair-mindedness, and a visit to Spain at every step shows she has not had her share of it from English-speaking peoples. With every chapter of our guide book railing at the Inquisition, I could not help feeling that these martyred Englishmen should not be so completely forgotten. Not that the tu quoque argument excuses persecution on either side. But an age should be judged by its own ethics or true views of history are impossible. The New Englanders who, two hundred years later than Isabella's institution, hanged a few Quakers on Boston Common were none the less moral men; and General Robert E. Lee fighting for slavery in the nineteenth century is a man we have a right to admire. The mere fact of the Inquisition being founded by that magnanimous woman called by Bacon "an honor to her sex and the cornerstone of the greatness of Spain" should tell us its motives were sincere. Her age had not yet learned the lesson, which we have acquired slowly, bit by bit through experience, that political or religious existence is possible with divided factions, not only possible but that a nation is more vigorous because of them. As Bishop Creighton wisely says: "The modern conception of free discussion and free thought is not so much the result of a firmer gasp of moral principles as it is the result of the discovery that uniformity is not necessary for the maintenance of political unity." Isabella's age agreed that persecution was necessary to preserve Christianity. And since only Spain was in immediate contact with Islam, and centuries of crusade against the invading infidel had the natural result of making the Spaniard sternly orthodox, it was there that the Inquisition flourished.

It dragged on for over three centuries, and from 1481 to 1812, 35,000 people were burned,[8] these numbers being Richard Ford's, to whom the Inquisition was as a red rag to a bull. The German scholar Schack acknowledges that all the Moors and heretics burned in Spain by the Holy Office do not equal the women witches burned alive in Germany during the seventeenth century alone. In France, in the one night of St. Bartholomew, almost as many victims fell as during the whole three hundred years of the Inquisition. Of England the publishing of recent investigations makes it needless to speak; blood flowed in torrents there. Besides those well known ones who met death under Mary Tudor, the Catholic martyrdoms give such details as the "Scavenger's Daughter," that cramping circle of iron; "Little Ease," where a prisoner, could not sit or stand or lie down; needles thrust under the nails; the rack-master of the Tower boasting he had made Alexander Briant longer by a foot than God had made him; the general custom of cutting down the victim from the gallows while still alive to tear out his heart and quarter him,—accounts that put the Autos da Fé in the shade. In the annals of Spain is not a scene that equals the blood curdling horror of the martyrdom in Dorchester, England, of Hugh Green in the year 1642.[9] Yet an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, if fanaticism or cruelty are mentioned, makes his inevitable trite reference to the Spanish Inquisition. It has been made the scape-goat of all religious persecution. Abuse has so fixed the idea that it was a barbarous machine controlled by contorted natures to whom bloodshed was a revelry that any effort to place it in a truer light is sure to be called retrogression. I am far from attempting a defense of this painful aberration of the Christian mind, but what I hold is, if a student went to the records of Alcalá and Simancas, open free to all, not to search out the hundred mistaken cases from the ten thousand proven ones, the method up to this, but, following the first law of intellectual work, investigation without preconceived bias, if he tried to understand this phase of man's slow development per errorem ad veritatem, then the thin-lipped, gleaming-eyed, bloodthirsty Inquisitor of the popular fancy would be taken from the pillory where he has been pelted these centuries past, and his mistaken sincerity stand justified by the conditions of his time.

The records prove that the Holy Office was used seldom against scholars but against relapsed Mohammedans and Jews, false beati, sorcerers, and witches. "Ningún hombre de mérito científico fué quemado por la Inquisición," is the clear statement of one of the greatest of living scholars, Menéndez y Pelayo, and he who would cross swords with that erudite champion must be sure indeed of his assertions. Not one Spanish thinker or statesman, such as Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, the Carthusian priors, Houghton, Webster, and Laurence, the poet Robert Southwell, the scholarly Edmund Campion, and a host of others,[10] graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, executed for their faith during the hundred and fifty years of religious persecution in England, not one man of like standing was put to death in Spain. Had he been, some righteous hater of the "ferocious Inquisitors," would ere this have produced his name and works. Archbishop Talavera was accused but was finally justified; if the poet Luis de León was imprisoned, he was set free on examination. It was not his own countrymen but Calvin in Geneva, who had the Spanish scholar, the Unitarian, Miguel Servet burned alive, and it was the mild Melanchthon who wrote to the reformer saying: "The Church owes thee gratitude. I maintain that the tribunal has acted in accordance with justice in having put to death a blasphemer." In Germany at that period the civil courts inflicted capital punishment on sorcery, blasphemy, and church robbery; had the same law held in Spain the number of the Inquisition executions would be appreciably lowered. Lord Bacon, who was a just and humane man, mentions as a matter of course that in his time the English civil courts used torture: the Peninsula was not ahead of its time in this respect.

As for that debated subject the effect on the Spanish character of the Santo Oficio, prejudices have built up so twisted a labyrinth that the best way out for one who would keep his level-headed balance is to hold fast to the thread of internal evidence. Unconscious of writing history for the future, hence his unassailable veracity, Cervantes tells in detail of the life in court and tavern, in the town and on the desolate highways after the Inquisition had flourished for more than a century. Does he portray a degraded race, finger on lips whispering, "Hush, or you will be overheard"? If the Spaniard was ground down in fear and deceit why is it that to-day, of all the peoples of the continent, he is the most independent in character? It has been said that a burgher of Amsterdam does not differ more from a Neapolitan, than a Basque from an Andalusian, yet in this trait of sturdy independence all Spaniards are alike; the historian Ticknor wrote during his stay in Spain, "The lower class is, I think, the finest material I have met in Europe to make a great and generous people." If under the Inquisition "every intellectual impulse was repressed,"[11] how dared theologians and philosophers, such as Vives, Isla, and Feijóo boldly attack with their pens superstitions and degenerated religious customs? Is the poetry of Juan de la Cruz, Luis de León and the prose of Teresa, the work of souls who feared to adore their God freely? And is it not undeniable that the two golden centuries of Spanish art and literature flourished under this bugbear horror, this "coco de niños y espantajo de bobos," as Menéndez y Pelayo calls it?

Used chiefly against Judaism and Islamism, occasionally the Inquisition became the tool of a tyrannic king for private vengeance. Indeed, there are some historians such as von Ranke, Lenormant, de Maistre, who hold it to have been more a royal than an ecclesiastic instrument, fostered by the Hapsburgs to augment their autocratic rule.[12] Certainly all confiscated property went to the Crown.

Man's slow development per errorem ad veritatem, slow indeed one may say, in the face of certain realities of our own time. Happily the generations of cant and holier-than-thou are passing, and we are looking history more honestly in the face. It is dawning on us that religious persecution in 1492 is no more frightful than slavery in 1860 or an Opium War in 1843.

Modern Spain realizes the wrong of persecution, the farce of a religion of love using the sword, as thoroughly as does every other civilized country. Outside the church of St. Philip Neri in Cadiz is a tablet proudly commemorating the abolition of the Inquisition within its walls in 1812.

To return to less nettlesome themes. The little English College, so interesting a memorial of past history, a forgotten haven of refuge in Old Spain, must be a peaceful memory to look back on by priests whose later lives are spent in Birmingham or London slums. The pleasant sitting-room of each inmate, the recreation hall with its theater, the library, with the latest English books jostling old Spanish tomes,—all spoke of contented full days. We turned the parchment leaves where the college records for its three hundred years in Spain have been kept, where each student is mentioned, from the troubled first days down to the group of ten who had arrived from England a week before our visit, among them a young Reginald Vaughan, nephew of the Cardinal.

With up-to-date hospital and busy manufactures, Valladolid does not seem like an ancient capital of the Spanish court. We would read in our guide book that the miserable Juan II had his favorite of a lifetime, Álvaro de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan's noble daughter married Ferdinand of Aragon; and that, seated on a throne in the Plaza Mayor, Charles V pardoned the remaining Comuneros, the rebels who had dared assert the federal principle against his centralization of government, Spain's last outcry before she sank under the blighting tyranny of her Hapsburg and Bourbon rulers. Such past happenings were interesting, but they would have the same meaning if read of in London or Boston. However, there were two memories of Valladolid that were vivid enough to haunt one as one walked about its hum-drum streets: they are associated with the saddest hours of two supreme men.

No. 7 Calle de Cristóbal Colón is the insignificant house where Isabella's High Admiral died in 1506, in obscurity and neglect, his patroness dead, and Ferdinand ungrateful. A hundred years later, in another small house, now owned by the government, Cervantes lived in poverty. Unknown and undivined he walked these streets, looking at the passers-by with his wise, tolerant eyes. Fresh, perhaps, from writing the monologue on the Golden Age, delivered by the Don over a few brown acorns of inspiration, Cervantes in threadbare cape went to his humble scrivener's work, the golden time of justice and kindness existing only in his own gallant heart. It was in Valladolid that the ladies of his household, widowed sisters, niece, his daughter and wife, sewed to gain their daily bread, and as if penury were not enough, here they were thrown into prison because a young noble, wounded in a street brawl, was carried into their house to die.

Cervantes' life reads like one of the romantic tales he loves to digress with in his great novel, when grandee, barber and priest, court lady, Eastern damsel, and labrador's daughter, gather round the inn table—the servants a natural part of the group—in the easy meeting of the classes which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcalá, Cervantes' first bent was toward literature, but having gone to Rome in the suite of a cardinal, in Italy he joined the army against the infidel. He fought at Lepanto, where his bravery drew on him the notice of Don John of Austria, that alluring young leader of whom one of his state council wrote, "Nature had endowed him with a cast of countenance so gay and pleasing that there was hardly anyone whose good-will and love he did not immediately win." It makes a pleasant picture, the visit of this high-spirited young hero to his wounded soldier in the hospital of Messina. Later, Cervantes fought at Naples, at Tunis, in Lombardy, making part of his century's stirring history, and all the while storing his mind with the culture of Italy. It was when returning to Spain that some Algerian pirates took him prisoner. His five years' captivity in Africa stand an unsurpassed exhibition of grandeur of character, proving that the highest gifts of mind and heart go together in perfect accord. Loaded with chains, twice brought to be hanged with a rope around his neck, his knightly spirit rose above all misery. There were twenty-five thousand wretched Christians then in bondage in Algiers. Cervantes waited on the sick, shared his food with the more destitute, encouraged the despairing,—a Christian in the fullest sense of the word is the testimony of a Fray Juan Gil, who, belonging to a brotherhood for the redemption of prisoners, worked for his release. In this harsh school "donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades"—the adversities that were to follow him all his life—was chastened to self-effacement and a sublime patience an ardent spirit that by nature chafed against wrong.

What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a nobility of sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable caballero andante! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit. A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life, so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight. The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted book ever written.

Toward the end of his slavery, when Cervantes passed into the hands of the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants, succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy accepted.

At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil. But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since Lepanto,—he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters. His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene where the cura burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one, Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses," has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.

Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other, his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote."

Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor, and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start, what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo. A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told, "He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier and a gentleman."

In 1613 appeared his "Novelas Exemplares," a remarkable collection of tales which gave Scott the idea of the Waverley novels. The second part of "Don Quixote," equal to the first in vigor and charm, appeared when Cervantes was sixty; "his foot already in the stirrup," he gives us in a preface, the moving description of himself. In the latter part of his life, according to a custom of the time, he became a tertiary of the Franciscan Order, and on his death in 1616 they buried him humbly in the convent of nuns in Madrid, where his daughter was a religious. Ill fortune still pursued him, for to-day there is no trace of his last resting-place.

It is with thoughts of this heroic life—this man lovable as his own Don, with a gentle stammer in his speech, and the kindly wise look in his eyes, his left hand maimed from Lepanto, his shoulders bowed and his chestnut hair turned to silver by the ceaseless calamities of life—it is with such memories one looks down from the high-road on the small house where he wrote his masterpiece. Columbus on his deathbed, and Cervantes in poverty writing "Quixote"—two such associations make a visit to Valladolid memorable.

OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS

"It is perfectly ridiculous to pretend that, because they dress the Madonna and saints in rich robes, the Spaniards are ignorant that a statue is but a symbol. They sing their faith, we whisper ours, but the words have the same meaning, and the same thought is in the mind ... Draw a bias line enclosing the Basque provinces,—Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and you have there old religious Spain as she appears in history, with a vivid and practical faith, an irreproachable clergy, a piety of the heart reflected in the manners."—RENÉ BAZIN.

WE left Valladolid toward evening, in order to stop over a night in Palencia, before going north to Asturias. The cathedral of Palencia is well worth the pause, even though the visit may be limited to a night in the Continental Inn and a hasty daybreak visit to the church; the small cities of central Spain are of so individual a character that each stamps itself separately and indelibly on the memory.

The dawn was just breaking on a raw, rainy morning when we walked through the silent streets of the town. In spite of the early hour, near each of the water fountains stood a long row of antique-shaped jars, some of red clay, some like old silver. For each housewife places her jar in line, and when the drinking water is turned on, each fills her crock in turn, according as it was put in the row. At the biblical wells of Palestine the Syrian women to-day use ugly, square Rockefeller oil cans, but happily conservative Spain is not partial to innovations. It was on this early morning walk that I first noticed the white palm leaves, some six feet in length, fastened to the balconies or above a window. One finds them all over the country. They are from the palm forests of Elche in the south, and each Easter new ones are blessed and hung out on the houses, some say to guard against lightning. Later, in Madrid, we saw one decorating the King's palace.

The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later, weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour. Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory, and through its iron rejas were seen the blurred glimmer of candles, the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca. The effect was indescribable,—austere, ascetic, yet with a passionate glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such unconscious naturalness.

Architects may say that Spanish cathedrals are exaggerated and overloaded, that they lack the restraint and purity of line of Chartres, Amiens, and the Isle de France churches which are the world's best Gothic. All this may well be true, yet Spain can smile securely at criticism. She has a soul in her places of worship, a soaring exaltation of the imagination that imparts the assurance of a living faith. Firmly and ardently she believes in Jesus Christ, her Redeemer, and with all her lofty intensity she prostrates herself in worship.

We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose effigies held their arms raised in prayer,—only a Spaniard could endure to look even at such a tiring attitude! But the time for loitering was limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North. The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled—in its literal sense—to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake, and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter.

Then again stretched the tawny plains. The fields of León were tractless wastes of mud from the rain of the past weeks. Seen from the car window, each village on the truncated mountain was the exact copy of its neighbor, the same monotonous note of color in adobe wall and denuded steppe. It was in vain to look for some distinction to mark one group of mud houses, called Paredes de Nava, birthplace of Spain's best sculptor Berruguete, from a similar mud-emblocked place called Cisneros, feudal home of Cardinal Ximenez's family; the imagination had to supply the difference.

Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely pace—about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route. From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast, and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of 8,000 feet.

We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills that now began seemed positively beautiful,—so many pleasures are relative.

Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit, emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish inroads to herd in a compact town.

As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,—a series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six miles is covered where a crow would fly seven.

The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne. The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the title of these distant mountains.

It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her husband was hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés?

When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues, speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of Asturish."

Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries. Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind us to the nobility of the Reconquista.

Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving, has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also—a thought that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in Moslem countries—if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture (always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set foot further south than Toledo.

Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never anything else but a despotism. This siglo de oro was well over by 1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the most scientific works of the Moors?

Mohammedan civilization in Spain, from decay within, was completely disintegrated by 1275. The caliphs of Granada led the lives of weak voluptuaries, artistic but decadent; no rose-colored romancing can veil their essential decline. Isabella's court, traveling with its university, with the learned Peter Martyr instructing the young nobles in Renaissance lore, so that a son of the Duke of Alva, and a cousin of the King are to be found among the lecturers of Salamanca, presents a noble contrast. When the Reconquista was achieved, and after three thousand seven hundred battles, the Spaniard was again master in his own land, grievous mistakes were made, until finally, in 1609, in a panic of fear that the corsairs of Africa were uniting with their co-religionists along the Spanish coasts, the Moriscos were expelled. Spain inflicted this blow on herself at an ill moment, since already from the enormous emigration to the New World, her crying need was population. But this act of bad government whereby she threw away over half a million of her inhabitants (always remember, however, far more Moorish blood remained than was lost, for nine centuries of occupation had well infiltered it through the southern provinces) did not drive out the intellectual and moral backbone of the land as we are given to understand. The Moors of Isabella's day were not the liberal-minded, cultivated people they had been under the Ommiade caliphs four centuries earlier, and the persecuted Moriscos of Philip III's time were far lower in standing. Also it cannot be questioned that Valencia, the province that expelled them, whose rich soil to-day supports a crowded population, quickly filled up, and soon showed with its irrigation the same industry that seemed peculiar to the Moors. It was central Spain, eminently "old Christian," that when its people flocked as adventurers to America, could offer neither fertile soil nor inviting climate to lure new settlers. The quotations usually cited to prove that Valencia was irremediably devastated by the Expulsion are taken from men who wrote within a few years of the disaster; it would be an easy matter, following the same sophistry to quote aspects of our South a generation ago that could make the Civil War appear an irremediable blight.

Seeking for the cause of the tendency to overrate the Moor at the expense of his hereditary enemy, it seems to me it is to be traced to that period of rancor, the Invincible Armada, when religious and political passions ran so high that it was forgotten that the hated Spaniard was before all else a Christian, and on his heroic struggle for the Cross had hung the civilization of Europe.

The capital of the Asturian province is Oviedo. Alfonso II, the eighth king that followed Pelayo, made it his chief city, but in spite of its antiquity it is a disappointing town. I had pictured an unspoiled bit of the past, locked in as it is by mountains whose valleys reach to the city gates, with curiously-named saints still serving as titulars, with the oldest remains of Christian architecture in the Peninsula. But the reality is a smug, commonplace, successful little city of slight local color. The mansions are Renaissance, not mediæval; if you stumble on an ancient street it soon brings you to a straight new boulevard. Children in English clothes and ladies dressed like Parisians walk in the park facing a line of pretentious apartment houses. I asked in the shops for pictures of the Cámera Santa. They could only give me postcards of the model prison and the model insane asylum. Sleepy little Palencia, with its rows of classic water jars waiting—time no consideration—till the water was turned on in the fountains, it seemed hardly possible we had left it only that morning. The remote old world may be found in central Spain, but as this is the land of anomalies, the mountain provinces of the north are busy to-day with mines and commerce. It remains but a question of time for Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, and Vigo, the northern harbors, to become commercial centers. They are awake at last and keen to enter the struggle.

This industrial tendency is what we agree in calling progress, and Spain has been censured for her backwardness in entering the world's competition, so it is not justifiable to regret the unambitious past. But who can be consistent in the home of el ingenioso hidalgo! From the moment of entering Spain till we left I leaned now to one side, now to the other, glad and proud one day to see her new industries, a model hospital or asylum, and scoffing the next, at a hideous new boulevard that had relieved a congested district. This land of racy types and vigorous humanity may be doomed to have factory chimneys belching smoke, to have lawless mobs of socialists and pitiful slums in cities where now is frugal poverty, where a beggar lives contentedly next door to a prince, because he feels the prince recognizes him as his fellow countryman and fellow Christian: progress and wealth are bought with a price. Oviedo, just entering the competition, and fast sweeping away its picturesque past, made me glad to be in time to see something of the old ways of Spain.

The lion of the city, the Cathedral, adds to this inconsistent feeling of disappointment. It is the only cathedral of the twenty and more we were to see that has removed the choir from the nave and placed pews down the center of the church. At Burgos the heavy blocking mass of the coro in the nave had startled and bewildered me, but soon I grew so accustomed to this Spanish usage that a church without it seemed incomplete. Oviedo has modernized its side chapels, recklessly sweeping away carvings and sarcophagi. It thought the tombs of Pelayo's successors, the early kings, were cluttering rubbish, so a good plain stone, easy to decipher, has been put up in place of the ancient memorials!

The Cathedral is perpendicular Gothic of the 14th century. The west façade has a spacious portico, whose effect, however, is lessened by the church being set so that you descend to it from the street. On one side of the portico rises the tower, bold and graceful, showing from its base to its open-lace stone turret an easy gradation of styles. This is the tower that runs like an echo through a powerful modern novel set in Oviedo, "La Regenta," by Leopoldo Alas. "Poema romántica de piedra," he calls it, "delicado himno de dulces líneas de belleza muda." Out of the south transept open cloisters that made, the first day of our visit, a charming picture in the sunshine after the weeks of cold rain; the red pendants of the fuschia bushes caught the long-absent warmth with palpable enjoyment. The shafts of the pillars here were oval shaped, not a wholly successful change, as in profile view they appeared unsymmetrical. Out of this south transept also opens the gem of the church, the Cámera Santa, which has escaped the general renovation as being too closely bound to the historical and religious past of Spain to be tampered with. Alfonso el Casto in 802 built this shrine, raised twenty feet from the church pavement to preserve it from damp. A small room with apostle-figures serving as caryatids leads to the sanctum sanctorum where the famous relics are kept. They were brought here in a Byzantine chest from Toledo when the Moors conquered that city, and probably there are few collections of old jewelers' work equal to them. Here is kept the cross Pelayo carried as a standard at the battle of Cavadonga more than eleven hundred years before. Few can help feeling in Spain the charm of continuous tradition. Never were her treasures scattered by revolution; that this was Pelayo's very cross is not problematic but a fact assured by unbroken record.

A printed sheet describing the sacred objects in the Cámera Santa is given to each visitor. It would be easy to turn many of these relics of a more naïve, less logical age, into ridicule. To one, however, who tries to see a new land with comprehending sympathy, to which alone it will reveal itself, these relics, brought back from the Holy Land by crusading knight or warrior bishop, are tender memorials of a great hour of Christian enthusiasm. One of the strongest traits of Spanish character is reverence for all links that bind it to its past, especially its religious past, and happy it is for such old treasures that they find shelter in a land where a Cámera Santa is still a shrine, not a museum. "¡Triste de la nación que deja caer en el olvido las ideas y concepciones de sus majores!"

If Oviedo itself is disappointing to those who seek the antiquely picturesque, the countryside that encircles it is doubly lovely. On a bright Sunday morning we walked out a few miles to see the church of Santa María de Naranco, built by Ramiro I back in 850. It was a steep scramble up the mountain side, for the road was like a torrent bed. Peasants on donkeys passed, on their way into the town for their day of rest, some with brightly decorated bagpipes groaning out their merriment. To avoid the sea of mud in the high road, we took short-cuts up the hills, following a peasant who, seated sideways on her donkey, balanced on her head a huge loaf of bread. And her bread, round and flattened in the center, was the exact shape of the loaves chiseled, centuries before, in the Bible scenes of Burgos choir-stalls. The old woman smiled and nodded as she smoked her cigarettes, watching us pick our way with difficulty where the tiny hoofs of her ass trod lightly. What cares a Spanish peasant whether the road is good or bad when he has a sure-footed donkey to carry him!

At length we reached the small church built by the third king after Pelayo. It is a room thirty-six by fifteen feet, with a chamber at the east and another at the west end. Along the north and south walls are pillars from which spring the arcades, and these pillars and arches make the support of the building; the walls merely fill in. This is the earliest example in Spain of the separation into active and passive members; whether the idea came from Lombardy or was of native birth is not known.

We climbed still higher up the red sandstone hill, among gnarled old chestnut trees, to where the ancient church of San Miguel de Lino stands. The oriental windows, being in Spain, would naturally be thought of Moorish origin, but their Eastern source antedates the Moor. They came from the Byzantine East, by way of the Bosphorus, not the Straits of Gibraltar. They are reminiscent of the time when the Goths, before their invasion of Spain, lived around the Danube.

On July 25th the scene near these two churches is a striking one. The village of Naranco is emptied of its folk that pious morn, as the peasants, in the same tranquil beauty as in old Greece, lead their garlanded oxen and heifers up to San Miguel. So unchanging are Spain's customs that the festival is paid for out of the spoils taken at the battle of Clavigo (in 846), where tradition says the loved patron of the Peninsula, the Apostle St. James, "él de España," came to fight in person. We were not so fortunate as to see this feast of Sant Jago, but we stumbled on a beautiful minor scene. As we returned by Santa María de Naranco, a group of peasants stood round the priest on the raised porch of the church, the center of interest being a baby three days old. Few women can resist a baptism, that solemn first step in a Christian life, so we drew near. The father was a superb-looking youth of about twenty, in a black velvet jacket; his crisp curly hair, his glow of color, and the proud outline of his features made him fit subject for the artist. The godmother, his sister it seemed from the resemblance, was a buxom girl in Sunday finery; the godfather was a younger brother of fourteen, who awkwardly held the precious burden. The old priest wore the wooden clogs of the people and made a terrible racket with every step. From the porch he led the way into the church, and after pausing half way to read prayers,—a scuffling old sexton held aslant a dripping candle,—they came to the baptismal font in the raised chamber at the west end. The young father went forward to the altar steps to kneel alone, and the godfather, with great earnestness, gave the responses. Then the cura poured the blessed water on the tiny head, and to prevent cold wiped it gently. The ceremony over, his wooden shoes clattered into the sacristy, the sexton blew out the candle, and the agile godmother claimed her woman's prerogative and tossed and crooned to the young Christian as she tied ribbons and cap-strings. The two strangers who had witnessed this moving little scene under the primitive carving of the Visigothic church wished to leave a good-luck piece for the small Manuela. But when they put the coin into the hand of the young parent who still knelt before the altar, he returned it with a beautiful, flashing smile. In halting Spanish they explained their good-luck wishes, and in that spirit the gift was accepted.

Seen from Naranco, the red-tiled roofs of Oviedo encircled by far-stretching mountains made a romantic enough scene. Seated on the trunk of a chestnut tree we watched the sun set over the exquisite valley. Immediately round us on the hillside had once stood the city of King Ramiro, obliterated as completely as the earlier Phœnician and Roman settlements in Spain. The dead city where we sat, the town below, distant from the bustle of the world yet fast approaching it, the glow and sweep of the sunset,—it is at moments such as these that the mind enlarges to a swift comprehension, untranslatable in speech, of the passing breath the ages are. The mountains change, the rivers capriciously leave their beds,—especially in Spain, where bridges stand lost in green meadows and are left undisturbed, for does not a proverb say, "Rivers return to forsaken beds after a thousand years?" And Spain has patience to wait! Whether it was the new-born child, the forgotten city, the up-to-date town below, or just the sun setting over that illimitable expanse of mountains, Santa María Naranco gave one an hour of the higher philosophy.

In the after-glow we walked back to Oviedo. Along the way the returning country people greeted us with ease and dignity: "Vaya Usted con Dios," the beautiful salutation, "Go thou with God," heard from one end of the land to the other. The beggar gives you thanks with it, the shop man dismisses you, the friend takes farewell, but its pleasantest sound is in the country, heard from the lips of clear-eyed peasants passing in the evening light.

This peasantry is by instinct well-bred, proud of a pure descent, by nature a gentleman, a caballero. A traveler's life and pocket are absolutely secure in these unfrequented northern provinces of "dark and scowling Spain." For a century those who have turned aside from the beaten track have brought back the same tale of courtesy and hospitality. There is much of Arcadian gentleness among these unlettered people. The Spanish labrador may not read or write, but he cannot be called ignorant; statistics here do not guide one to a true knowledge. The country people hand down in the primitive way, from one generation to the other, a ripe store of human wisdom, that often gives them a wider outlook on life and a deeper strength of character than that of the educated man who shallowly criticises them. They are unspoiled and very human, the women essentially feminine, the men essentially manly; daily this note of virility strikes one,—one grows to love their expressive, beautiful word, varonil. "The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men,—diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men,—hunger, and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky." When one can say a thing like that, one is born to appreciate Spain. Will not Mr. Gilbert Chesterton go there and study some day her untamable grand old qualities and describe her as she should be described? If such a country population had had good government during the past three hundred years instead of the worst of tyrannies, where would it stand to-day? Though such a surmise is foolish, for perhaps it is because of its isolation that the Spanish peasantry is racy and vigorous. Knowing the hopelessness of battling against corruption in high places in Madrid, it lived out of touch with modern life, elevated by its intense faith, the hard-won inheritance from the Reconquista,—and a peasant's faith is his form of poetry and ideality, which when taken from him makes him lose in refinement and charm.

Back in the Basque provinces the new idea had dawned on us that this was not a spent, degenerate race, but a young unspoiled one, and every excursion in the country parts of Spain made deeper the assurance of red blood coursing in her veins. Corrupt government has deeply tainted the city classes, has made loafers, and men who open their trusts to the silver key, but the heart of the people is sound. It has been tragically wounded by rulers to whom, an heroic trait, it has ever been loyal. If a country after centuries of misrule had the same power to govern herself as a nation that had had enlightened government for the same length of time, would not one of the best arguments for good government be lost? It may be a long time before Spain learns the restraint of self-rule. But go among the vigorous mountaineers of the north, talk with the patient, sober Castilian labrador, watch the Catalan men of industry and you will see the possibility of her future. A noble esprit de corps controls the Guardia Civil who are the keepers of law and security in Spain, to whom a bribe is an insult. Let the same spirit extend to the other departments,—to the post, to the railway, the civil government; let the judge sit on an impregnable height; let the priest of Andalusia have as solemn a realization of his office as the priest of Navarre, of Aragon, of old Castile; let the women be given a wider education (though may nothing ever change their present qualities as wives and mothers), and Spain is on the right road.

Cavadonga was merely a two days' trip from Oviedo, yet we had to forego it. The weather was too abominable; while Málaga on the southern coast of Spain has an average of but fifty-two rainy days in the year, this city on the northern coast has only fifty-two cloudless days. The thought of a rickety diligence over miles of muddy roads kept enthusiasm within bounds. After a short pause in the Asturian capital we took the train back to León. The valleys were a veritable paradise; now we skirted a wide river flowing under heavily-wooded hills, now we crossed fields covered with the autumn crocus, and saw from the balconies of the farmhouses yellow tapestries of corn cobs hung out to dry.

Some day, not so far distant as an ideal government in Spain, the lover of independence and untouched nature will come to these northern provinces instead of going to hotel-infested Switzerland. The temperate climate, the trout and salmon rivers, the courtesy of the people, make these valleys between the mountains and the sea an ideal tramping and camping ground for the summer.

THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEÓN

"I stood before the triple northern porch
Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,
Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,
Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say:
'Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot
Of faith so nobly realized as this.'"
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

THERE have been many efforts to divide Spain into right-angled departments similar to those of her neighbor France. The individual land throws off such efforts to bring her into geometric proportion: never can her thirteen immemorial divisions, her thirteen historic provinces be wiped out. Each is an entity with ineradicable characteristics and customs. Their boundaries may seem confused on a paper map, but they are reasonable in the flesh and blood geography of mountains and river valleys, or the psychological geography of early affiliation and conquest.

No Alfonso or Ferdinand will ever be King of Spain, but King of the Spains, Rey de las Españas. Mi paisano, the term which stands for the closest bond of fellowship, is used by an Aragonese of an Aragonese, by a Catalan of a Catalan, never by an Aragonese of an Andalusian, or a Catalan of a Castilian. The independent Basque provinces, (where the monarch is merely a lord) the free mountain towns of Navarre, stiff-necked Aragon, these never will merge themselves in Old Castile. Nor can Catalonia, self-centered, humming with manufactures and seething with anarchy, understand pleasure-loving Andalusia, that basks under fragrant orange trees as it smiles its ceaseless mañana. Valencia and Murcia, where crop follows crop in prodigal fruitfulness are the antithesis of desolate Estremadura, and of that immortal desert of Don Quixote the denuded steppes of New Castile, to their north. And the mountain provinces of Galicia and the Asturias, of idyllic hill and dale, yet with seaports fast awakening to commercial life, look with little sympathy on the sluggish province of León that borders them.

Industrial advancement is on its gradual way in Spain, but there is not a hint of its movement in this oldest of the separate kingdoms. Zamora, Astorga, León, Salamanca, the romantic cities of the earlier days of chivalry, lie asleep; the whistle of the railways has failed to rouse them. You must lay aside all theories of modern comfort here, and make the tour in the spirit of a pilgrim lover of the antique and picturesque. What else could be expected in a province where the peasantry still embroider their coarse linen sheets with castles and heraldic lions, in a land where even the blazonry of a city rings with a psalm, Ego autem ad Deum clamavi. The centuries of forays have bequeathed a hardy endurance to the people, but they are the cause at the same time of the scanty population of the plains, the tragic evil of central Spain.

We got to the city of León the day of a horse fair. Fresh from wide-awake Oviedo, it was like stepping back into an older world; here was old Spain much as it was in the time of Guzmán[13] the Good, the defender of Tarifa in 1294, whose casa solar faced the plaza where the fair was held. The peasants who bargained in groups, wore toga-draped capes and wide-brimmed felt hats edged with an inch of velvet; every horse in Spain must have been gathered there, and an equal number of kind-eyed woolly little donkeys, essential factors of a Spanish scene. "The Castilian donkey has a philosophic, deliberate air," wrote Théophile Gautier on his sympathetic tour in the Peninsula seventy years ago, "he understands very well they can't do without him; he is one of the family, he has read 'Don Quixote,' and he flatters himself he descends in direct line from the famous ass of Sancho Panza."

A step beyond the horse fair brought us to massive Roman walls with frequent semi-circular towers; León's name comes from Augustus' 7th Legion who fortified it against the highlanders of the north. Built into the walls is the remarkable church of San Isidoro encrusted with later work, but with the strong Romanesque lines still prominent. The pilgrims who flocked from Europe to Santiago Compostella in the Middle Ages were partly the means of bringing this style into Spain; thus San Isidoro is of Burgundian origin, just as Santiago Cathedral resembles Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and the Catalan churches show Lombard features. Though the Spaniard adapted the style to his own character, adding the original feature of outside cloisters for the laity, its importation nipped in the bud a just beginning national architecture, whose loss cannot but be regretted. San Isidoro has a privilege seldom given, the Blessed Sacrament being exposed every day of the year, and always before its lighted altar one sees veiled figures kneeling. It served as the pantheon for the kings who followed Ordoño II—twelfth in descent from Pelayo—who removed his capital from Oviedo here, and the ancient burial chamber still has ceilings painted in the stiff Byzantine manner with obscure color, hard lines, and lack of perspective, probably the oldest paintings in Spain. The "Romancero" tells how Jimena, the gallant, golden-haired wife of the Cid, came here after the birth of her child to attend Mass. She wore the velvet robes given her by the king on the day of her marriage, a richly jeweled hair-net, gift of the Infanta Urraca, her rival; around her neck painted medals of San Lázaro and San Pedro, santos de su devoción, and so beautiful was she that the sun stood still in his course to see her better. At the church door the king met her and escorted her in honor, for was not her husband away fighting the infidel for his monarch? There is so true a ring to the old ballads that Jimena lives a real personage.

"Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella" runs an old verse on Spanish Cathedrals. And the Cathedral of León merits its name. It is harmoniously beautiful, pure French-Gothic, graceful and elegant, classic if the word is permissible for the unrestrained individualism of Gothic art. Built in one age without intermission, in 1303 the Bishop announced that no further contributions were needed, and the centuries since have left the church untouched. Here no cold Herrera portal usurps some lovely pointed work and Churrigueresque extravagancies are not prominent: the late restorations have followed the first plans.

Always excepting the Pórtico de la Gloria in Santiago, the west doorways of León Cathedrals stand for the best in Spanish sculpture. The statue of the Virgen Blanca in the center is famous. Around her the saints and apostles are grouped in appealing attitudes;—out of proportion though they may be as to hands and feet, their sincerity covers all flaws: here, a homely face with care-worn wrinkles of goodness; there, one beaming in satisfaction to be standing in such a chosen band. The lunette over the central door is delightful. On one side, in Heaven, a clerk plays the organ, while a boy blows the bellows, and groups stand chatting near, for a Spaniard's idea of bliss, in those days also, took the form of ease and desultory talk. Hell, on the opposite side, not to be outdone, has two urchins blowing bellows as well, not to make music but to quicken a fiery caldron into which devils are thrusting the sinners. The enjoyment of the old sculptor in his Heaven and Hell was too keen to be confined in the lunette and he has spread himself over the curving of the arches; in spite of time and retouching these three doorways show exquisite detail chiseling.

"About their shoulders sparrows had built nests
And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,
Now on a miter poising, now a crown,
Irreverently happy."

Within León Cathedral all is quiet and solemn, a true beauty of holiness. There is no clutter of side chapels in the nave but a sheer sweep of windows filled with the jeweled glass of Flemish masters.[14] These windows come as a surprise in a land where churches are guarded from the sun, and often the open triforium and clearstory, as at Avila, are walled up later to darken the interior. The chancel and choir are worth detail study. The coro seats have panels carved with single figures,—saints with their emblems, warriors with raised visors, placid-faced nuns, thoughtful bishops, gallant pages with their crossed feet gracefully poised,—all of a noble type, with high brow and aquiline nose. Spain has comparatively nothing to show in the way of frescoes, she had no early Masaccio, no Giotto, no Filippo Lippi, to paint the costumes and features of his generation, but wood carvings are her substitute; in them, and in her unrivaled tombs can be read the contemporary history of warrior, bishop, and page. The retablo of the High Altar is of the same simple elegance as the rest of the church. The usual towering one of carved scenes would have been singularly out of place, it is appropriate for the big dark interior of Seville Cathedral, but here are grace and restraint instead of grandeur and mystery, and most suitable are the ancient paintings of varying sizes, gathered from scattered churches and framed together. Radiating round the chancel are chapels that give to the exterior view of the apse a truly French-Gothic air, flying buttresses supporting the cap of the capilla mayor.

Romanesque, Gothic, and Plateresque are each well represented in León City. In the last style is the noticeable convent of San Marcos that stands isolated outside the town beside the swift blue-green river. The Knights of Santiago built a resting-place on their pilgrimage route back in the 12th century, but the present building is of Isabella's day, and the architect has given free rein to his silversmith's arabesques and medallions, and scattered pilgrim shells all over the façade of the church. We tried to get into the Museum, now in the convent, as it contains some good wood carvings, but an aged beggar at the door explained "Mañana," the easy "to-morrow," as prevalent in León as in Andalusia,—then rising to the occasion as only an Italian or Spanish beggar can, he swept open his toga-draped cape, smiling as he pointed to the entrance door: "To-morrow, after your morning chocolate, it will be open for you."

It was sunset as we turned away. The long mass of San Marcos stood boldly against the red glow of the sky. The horizon was outlined by the blue mountains of Asturias. With our imagination filled with the old days when pilgrims flocked here from England, from the forests of Germany, from the Po and the Danube, suddenly over the ancient bridge rode a troop of cavaliers on prancing steeds, in cloaks and plumed hats. The kindly blessed illusion hid the fact that our pilgrim-knights were sturdy peasants in the national capa, riding their long-haired horses back from the city fair.

"Sin el vivo calor, sin el fecundo
Rayo de la ilusión consoladora
¿Que fuera de la vida y del mundo?"

asks one of Spain's poets of the 19th century, Núñez de Arce, and in his native country it takes but little effort of the imagination to repeople the solemn churches, the narrow city streets, or the treeless plain with the romantic figures of the past.

The following day at dawn, after a miserable night in rooms like icy death, a true pilgrim night of endurance, we took the train for the west. As we entered the railway carriage Reservado para Señoras a sleepy railway-guard stumbled out of the further door; all through the journey in the north, we roused these cozily-ensconced railway-officials, for so rare are ladies alone on this route, that the conductors have fallen into the habit of sleeping in the carriage reserved for them. When our tickets were collected we were given many a severe look for daring to upset a cosa de España.

On the way from León to Astorga, little over thirty miles, the realization of the old pilgrim route is vivid. Before reaching Astorga comes the paladin's bridge,[15] of Órbigo, where in the reign of Isabella's father ten caballeros andantes challenged every passing pilgrim to a bout of arms; if a lady came without a cavalier to fight for her, she forfeited her glove, if any knight declined to fight he lost his sword and spur. The age of knight errantry which Cervantes has haloed with a deathless charm, breathes in this historic Pass of Honour. The leader, Suero de Quiñones, came of the great Guzmán family, to which St. Dominic belonged, and of which the Empress Eugénie was a scion. To show his captivity to his lady, every Thursday he wore an iron chain round his neck, but when victor in this tourney, it was removed with solemnity by the heralds. Suero's sword is to be seen to-day in the Madrid Armory where in an hour more of Spain's real history is learned than in years of reading.

The Roman walls of Astorga, seen from the railway present an imposing appearance: here, as at León and Lugo, the frequent half-circular towers do not rise above the crest of the walls. Astorga must have looked just like this when the pilgrims rode by to the shrine of St. James. A closer inspection spoils the illusion however, for the proud city that once ranked as a grandee of Spain is to-day a very tattered and worn hidalgo, and there is a sad air of desolation about its plaza and crumbling walls. Whether or not it was because our ramble was by early morning before the inhabitants were astir, at any rate I brought away a picture of a depopulated town. There were but a few silent worshipers under the clustered piers of the late-Gothic Cathedral, whose reddish tower is the important feature of the distant view. What had tempted us to pause a night in Astorga was the wood-carved retablo by Becerra in the Cathedral, but we found it by no means equal to the work of the carvers in Valladolid. Becerra had studied under Vasari in Rome, and the influence is shown too plainly. There is a curious weather cock on the church, a wooden statue called Pedro Mata, dressed in the costume of a singular tribe that lives in some thirty villages near by. The origin of the Maragatos is involved in mystery; some say they are the descendants of Moors taken in battle, some of Goths who sided with the Moors. During all these centuries they have kept separate from the people about them, like gypsies they marry only with themselves. They should not be confounded with gitanos, however, for the Maragatos are honest and industrious; they are the carriers of the countryside, with the privilege of taking precedence on the road. Here and there in Spain one stumbles on a strange, isolated relic of the past such as this. Astorga was still sleeping, in the literal as well as figurative sense, when we left; a walk on top of the walls looking out over the León plain, a regret that we could not sketch the artistic church of San Julián, with its faded green door and crumbling portal, and we turned south. On the train I discovered that a five franc piece given me in change by the innkeeper, was nothing but a bit of silver-washed brass advertising the cakes of one Casimiro in Salamanca, and I, seeing the king's effigy, had thought it a genuine Spanish dollar,—it is easy to be caught napping in León.

Zamora is not many miles from Astorga and like the other sleepy towns of the province, it too seems to feel it has a right to a long pause in obscurity after its heroic centuries of Moorish warfare. The great hour of the city was the time of the Cid; the "Romancero" should be in one's pocket here. One of its stirring incidents is the death of King Ferdinand I, in 1065, and its sequel of battles and sieges. The king lies on his deathbed, holding a candle, great prelates at his head and his four sons on his right hand. With the fatal propensity of Spanish rulers to bequeath discord, he divides his kingdom among his sons; to Don Sancho, Castile; León to Alfonso; the Basque provinces to García; the fourth son already was of enough importance, "Arzobispo de Toledo, Maestre de Santiago, Abad en Zaragoza, de las Españas, Primado." The king's daughter Urraca, she who had given the Cid's wife, Jimena, her jeweled hair-net, now complains bitterly that she is left out of the inheritance, so her dying father gives her the fortress-city of Zamora, "muy preciada, fuerte es á maravilla," and "who takes it from you let my curse fall on him." In spite of which threat her wicked brother Sancho, besieges the city,—a Spanish proverb for patience runs: "No se ganó Zamora en una hora." With Sancho comes his chief warrior Roderick Díaz de Bivar, given the title of Cid Campeador, Lord Champion, by the Moorish envoys who here met him. The Cid had wellnigh fought an entrance into the city when the intrepid Urraca ascends a tower—to-day called the Afuera Tower—and delivers her famous scolding.

"¡Afuera! Afuera! Rodrigo,
El sóberbio Castellano!"

"Out! Out! Rodrigo, proud Castilian! Remember the past! When you were knighted before the altar of Santiago, and my father, your sponsor, gave you your armor, my mother gave you your steed, and I laced on your spurs! For I thought to be your bride, but you, proud Castilian, set aside a king's daughter to wed that of a mere Count!" And the ballad tells how the Cid, hearing her upbraiding with emotion, retired with his men.

The only present attraction of the decayed town is its Cathedral, set high above the Duero on the edge of the bluff along which Zamora stretches. It was built by the Cid's confessor, Bishop Gerónimo, the dome above the transept crossing being an original feature which the bishop was to elaborate later in the old Cathedral of Salamanca; as Trinity Church, Boston, is copied from this last, Zamora has a special interest for the visitor from New England. We had a four hours' pause there, ample time to see the city. It was raining so dismally that my fellow traveler decided not to face a certain drenching, as the long-drawn-out town had to be traversed before reaching the Cathedral. In an unfortunate moment I started out alone for what I supposed would be a leisurely exploring of a venerable city. Fleeing in distress would better describe the reality, for every hooting boy and girl in Zamora followed at my heels. Whether it was a white ulster or an automobile veil tied over my hat as the wind was high, or just the unaccustomed figure of a stranger in those narrow streets, an excited crowd pursued me the whole length of the town. In front, walking backward, open-mouthed, went a dozen urchins, and behind came a long brigade I hardly dared look back on, it so increased with every step. Men hastened to their shop doors to wonder at the crowd, and the passers-by stood still in astonishment; a feeling of horror came over me at such publicity. In vain I fled into churches in the hope of escaping the relentless little pests; when I emerged they greeted me with howls of pleasure. I angrily shook my umbrella at them, but that only added to the glorious excitement. Here and there a kind woman came to the bothered stranger's help, and scattered the crowd. The children merely scampered down side streets to meet me again in still greater numbers at the next corner. It is easy to laugh now that it is over, but at the time there is small amusement in fleeing through a foreign city pursued by forty hooting youngsters, to have them press round you in a stifling circle when you pause to look in your book, to have them gaze long and seriously at you, then burst into uncontrollable laughter so that in desperation you begin to feel if you have two noses or six eyes. We had decided that in most of the unfrequented towns of Spain, the children were a nuisance; in Zamora they were positive vampires. A visitor in the future had best wear black, a black veil on the head, a black prayer-book in the hand, as if on the way to church, then resembling other people, the children may let her pass. But a white ulster and a red guide book are magic pipes of Hamelin to lure every idle child in Zamora. In spite of wind and rain, and a lengthy disappearance within the Cathedral, it was only on reëntering the station, several hours after they had first seized on their prey, that the unsolicited escort left me, and even then they hung round the door till the shriek of the engine told them the escaped lunatic who had given them so splendid an afternoon's entertainment was out of reach.

GALICIA

"Blessed the natures shored on every side
With landmarks of hereditary thought!
Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong
Beyond near succour of the household faith,
The guarded fold that shelters, not confines!
Their steps find patience in familiar paths
Printed with hope by loved feet gone before
Of parent, child or lover, glorified
By simple magic of dividing Time."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

JERUSALEM, Rome, Santiago,—perhaps this claims too much for the Spanish pilgrimage shrine? It would not in the Middle Ages, when the Christians of all Europe flocked there to pray beside the tomb of St. James the Elder, the patron of Spain invoked in the battle cry of her chivalry for a thousand years, "¡Santiago y cierra España!"—"St. James and close Spain!" A Latin certificate used to be given to every pilgrim, and it was kept among family records, for there were properties that could only be inherited if one had gone to Santiago Compostella. To-day Spaniards are the only devotees, though as I write I see that a band of English pilgrims with the Archbishop of Westminster at its head is visiting the far-off corner of Galicia. Though few travelers turn out of their way there, it is one of the most characteristic spots to be seen in Spain, a solemn old granite city, with arcaded streets and vast half-empty caravansaries darkened with humidity and age.

It takes over fifteen hours to go from León to Santiago, but the journey is a beautiful one, with mountains and fertile valleys, and rivers such as the Sill and that gem of the province, the Miño. At Monforte the railway branches, one line goes to Túy and Santiago, and the other turns up to Lugo and Coruña. We took this last, tempted by accounts of Lugo.

It is indeed a unique little city, walled around without a break by Roman battlements forty feet high, on the top of which is the fashionable promenade of the town. With its walls and the view from them, it closely resembles Lucca. Lugo was a surprise in various ways. It had a hotel, the "Fernán Núñez," so up-to-date that it boasted a tiled bathroom with hot water and a shower bath. Not only the comfortable inn but the streets of the town were a model of propriety. As always, our steps turned first to the Cathedral, spoiled outside, as is unfortunately the way in Spain, by those two disastrous centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, but within being of the lovely transition period, Romanesque as it merged into Gothic, with the arches just slightly pointed. The irrepressible Churriguera has worked himself into the inside of the church too; his canopy over the High Altar is abominable, though it would take more than that to detract from the simple solemnity of such a church. Lugo is one of the holiest spots in the Peninsula, like San Isidoro in León, it claims the privilege of perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, only more privileged than León, exposed night as well as day. So proud is the province of this ancient custom that the Host is represented on the shield of Galicia.

No matter at what hour you enter the Cathedral, there are worshipers; two priests always kneel before the tabernacle, and they never kneel alone. The scenes of humble piety drew me back to the church again and again with compelling attraction. To me a Spaniard praying unconsciously before the altar is unequaled by any act of worship I have witnessed; not even the touching Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem kissing the pavement in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, nor the Arab at sunset kneeling alone in the desert, can impress more powerfully. It seemed as if this tranquil shrine of Lugo spread an influence of uplifting thought through the whole contented little town; in the quiet afternoon a withered grandmother knelt with her hands on the head of a little tot of six who repeated the prayers that fell from the old lips, or three young women of the upper class sought a retired corner of the church to repeat together their daily chaplet; now in a side chapel, a peasant thinking herself unobserved, in a glow of devotion, encircled the altar on her knees.

On leaving the west door of the Cathedral, we ascended the inclined path that leads to the promenade on top of the walls. It was sunset, an exquisite hour to look out on the well-wooded countryside, through which meandered the trout-filled Miño. In the distance were mountains. No wonder the Romans, who ferreted out most of the choice spots of Europe, used to come to this city for the thermal baths. The handsome modern Lugonians strolled around the ramparts, pausing to chat here and there in the semicircles made by the numerous towers of the wall. Now a white-haired matron draped in the national mantilla, loitered leisurely by, with some of the higher ecclesiastics of the Cathedral; now a mother and two grave, pretty daughters passed, watched discreetly by the young beaux. Evidently far-off little Lugo, tucked away in the unknown northwestern corner of Spain, had a social life that sufficed for itself, with no envy of Madrid and San Sebastián. The local contentment found everywhere in the country struck me as admirable. Will "progress" unsettle it? We could have stayed a month in Lugo. To fish in the Miño, to ramble over the fertile country, to feel about one peaceful, contented human beings, would make a summer there a happy experience.

When we went on to Coruña, a commercial town that, like seaports the world over, has a rough populace, we were glad to have first seen Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán's loved province at pretty Lugo. In travel there must always be, I suppose, some places that one slights; one knows if one stayed long enough they might show a pleasanter side. We treated Coruña in this way. Sir John Moore, buried at midnight during the Peninsula War, was our association with the town before going there, and for all we saw of it Sir John will remain the chief association of the future. We only saw the flat, commercial district that skirts the bay, not the headland where the old town lies. Slatternly beggars pestered us, bold, bare-legged girls stood mocking at the unaccustomed sight of foreign women traveling; it was with relief we took the diligence that started at noon for Santiago.

I shall never cease regretting that we did not wait till the following day, when an electric diligence makes the journey, for that eight hours' trip over the hills to the capital was for us the only horrible experience of our tour in Spain. I wish I might blot out its memory, but as I am setting down frankly everything that occurred, this scene of cruelty must be told of, too. In the omnibus with us were but two other people, and there were five horses; there seemed no reason to foresee trouble. For the first relay of twelve miles all went well, and we enjoyed looking back from the hills on the blue Atlantic where the headland of Coruña jutted boldly out. Our drivers treated the horses with consideration and dismounted at every ascent. But, alas, for the second relay, we changed men and changed animals. Two young vagabonds were now on the box, driving four such miserable, bony nags that it tore the heart to see the sores the rope harness had made. We protested at the use of such horses, but in vain. Twelve miles lay behind, twenty-four were ahead, there were no inns, so we hesitated to desert the diligence, but had we realized the two hours of purgatory we were to face, we had dismounted and walked back to Coruña.

One young wretch drove with loud cries and slashing blows; the other alighted to beat the quivering animals up the hills. They guided so recklessly that we were once dashed down the bank into the gutter, and soon after run into a hay-cart and the wheels unlocked with difficulty. When at length they began to strike the spent beasts over the eyes our anger burst all bounds. In a heat of fury never before experienced, and I hope never again, we attacked those two brutal boys. I do not think they will soon forget that scene. At first they replied with impudence and went on lashing the horses. But impudence soon ceased. When two women are in earnest and are fearless of consequences, and have stout umbrellas, they win the day. The twelve miles of their escort over, and new horses harnessed to the diligence—those four pitiful, bleeding victims led away!—the two scoundrels slunk off, sore on arms and shoulders as well as shamed in spirit, for the country people who gathered round supported our protest. The remaining miles to Santiago finished well, with good drivers and stout horses. But never will the horror of those two hours leave me. In fairness I must add that this was the only scene of cruelty I saw during the eight months in Spain, and again and again I noticed plump happy donkeys who were treated as members of the family. It is far-fetched to account for this unfortunate instance by the bull-fight, since in countries that have no such spectacles, veritable skeletons are made to haul cabs, and poor jades are used for drag horses. But I cannot help seizing on this opening for a little tirade against the national game of Spain, which Fernán Caballero, who loved her home with passionate affection called, "inhuman, immoral, an anachronism in this century." The sports of other lands are open to harsh criticism. I do not think a Spaniard is more cruel by nature than an Englishman; in both nations is a certain proportion of coarsened characters,—the northern country may keep them better out of sight in the slums.

Northern Europe is to-day more humane to animals than southern Europe, because the women of the north have had greater freedom and have entered into philanthropic interests such as this. Kindness to animals is a modern movement everywhere (may the shade of St. Francis of Assisi forgive this half statement!) Spain need not be too discouraged by being behindhand. The bony exhausted horses used within my own remembrance on our American street-car lines, to drag cars laden each evening to twice the beasts' strength, would not be tolerated to-day, and this change has been wrought by societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the membership made up chiefly of women and children. Would that Spanish ladies could be pricked to action by the statement of a living French novelist, made in ignorance of late conditions in America and England, that kindness to animals is a Protestant virtue. It is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but common to all human societies where women are allowed to aid with their gentler instincts in the public welfare of their country. The bull and the man are sport and skill, that part I can understand. It is the agony of the horses that is a disgrace to these shows, worn-out nags who can make no resistance are used, and when the bull gores them, their entrails are thrust back and the dying beasts pricked on to the fray. Herein lies the great difference between bull-fights to-day, which are debased money-making spectacles only taken part in by professionals, and the more chivalrous sport of earlier times when the hidalgo was toreador, and proper steeds that could defend themselves were used.

The bull-fight is found in Spain so early that its origin from the Roman period in the Peninsula, or from the first Mohammedan conquerors, is disputed. The Cid took part in a game, and games celebrated the marriage of Alfonso VII's daughter Urraca to the king of Navarre. During the reign of Isabella's father, Juan II, the corrida de toros was much in vogue. Queen Isabella herself disliked the sport, and in one of her letters she vows never to witness it. On the birth of Philip II in Valladolid, Charles V killed a bull in the arena. The fiestas continued under the Hapsburg Philips, until the advent of the French Philip V, in 1700. He so slighted this national sport that gentlemen ceased to take part in it, and it sank to its present level. It is now so well paying an affair that the only way to reform it would be through concerted action on the part of Spanish women. It is a crusade worthy of them.

A night of rest in the hotel at Santiago and the painful scene of the day before was somewhat dimmed. Early in the morning I started out to explore the old pilgrim city. It has a distinct character of its own, seldom have I felt so decided a place-influence. It is very solemn, very gray, very stately and aloof. On many of the houses the pilgrim shell is carved; the streets are paved with granite and the vast hospices are of the same severe stone, moss-grown and damp; grass also grows between the big granite slabs of the silent, imposing squares. Santiago does not belong to our age. Modern towns do not name their streets after twelfth-century prelates, "Street of Gelmúrez, 1st Archbishop of Compostella," makes a novel sign.

Here, as all over the land, the Cathedral was the magnet. I walked along the dark, arcaded streets in a Scotch drizzle, passed under Cardinal Fonseca's college and came out in the plaza before the west entrance. The west front is a baroque mass which those who can endure that style say is most successful. I cannot endure that style. It seemed to me doubly a pity that this late front should mask the chief treasure of Galicia, the Pórtico de la Gloria, which stands as an open portico to the church, fifteen feet within this west door.

Enthusiastic description had led us to expect much of what may be called the supreme work of Romanesque sculpture, in fact, it was this portico that had decided us for the long trip to Galicia. We were not disappointed. "Es la oración más sublime que ha elevado al cielo el arte español." Neither photograph nor words can describe it; it is one of those matchless works that body forth the best of an age. The model of South Kensington does not give its nobility, for it is the setting before the lofty dim Romanesque nave that makes it a unique thing. When later, in Constantinople, I saw Alexander's sarcophagus, the thought of Santiago sprang instantly to my mind. Both bring a feeling of sadness;—one, simple flowing Greek of the best period, the other, crabbed, original, mediæval,—they are alike in the absolute sincerity with which each embodied the highest then attainable. Over the carvings of both are faded traces of color that give the finishing touch of the exquisite.

The Archbishop, Don Pedro Suárez, in 1180 gave the commission for this portico to a sculptor named Mateo, whether Spanish or foreign is not known; he lived in Santiago till 1217. He must have been a close student of the Bible, for his symbolism is profound and harmonious. Above the central arch is a solemn Christ, of heroic size, at his side the four Evangelists, figures of youthful beauty: the lion and the bull have settled themselves cozily in their patron's lap. Large angels on either side carry the instruments of the Passion. Very fine statues of the Apostles stand against the pillars of the central doorway. In the tympanum are small figures typifying the Holy City of Isaiah, and on its arch are seated, on a rounding bench, the twenty-four ancients of the Apocalypse, with musical instruments and vases of perfume. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of the portico. For hours one can study it. Some of the heads are thrown back in revery, some turned together in conversation. "The four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb having everyone of them harps and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints" (St. John, Rev. V, 8). The carvings of that age were somewhat grotesque, but here the types are ideal, as beautiful in their way as Mino da Fiesole or Rossellino. When Master Mateo had finished his work, he made a statue of himself below the central column of the portico, kneeling toward the altar and humbly beating his breast; on this figure was written "architectus." Humility and a consummate profession of faith such as this went hand in hand.

It is anticlimax, after the Pórtico de la Gloria, to speak of the other sights of Santiago. On the plaza before the west end of the Cathedral stands the dignified Hospital Real, founded by Isabella and Ferdinand as a pilgrim inn. Two of the four patios are quaintly carved, and probably amuse the convalescents of the modern hospital lodged now in the building. It was a joy to find so many of Isabella's good deeds still bearing fruit. The nuns took us down to the big kitchen, white-tiled and spotless, where we saw the four hundred fresh eggs that arrive daily from the country; the tidy patients on the verandas showed clearly that no one suffered privations here. As we were leaving, the old chaplain of the institution ran after us to beg us to return to see something of which he was evidently vastly proud. When he ushered us into a tiled bathing room and turned on the water that dashed up and down and round about from every kind of new contrivance, he looked at us with a self-complacency that was adorable, as if he said: "There, you water-loving English, we're just as fond of it as you!" The excellently managed institution reminds one that this province produced Doña Concepción Arenal, sociologist and political economist, and withal a most tender-hearted Christian, whose books on prison organization and reform have been widely translated, and are quoted as authorities by the leading criminologists of Europe. For thirty years this admirable woman was inspector of prisons. She died at Vigo in 1893, and Spain has since erected statues in her honor.

In Galicia, as in Catalonia, there has been a revival of dialect literature. The Gallego tongue was the first in the Peninsula to reach literary culture, and in the Middle Ages two ideal troubadours wrote in it. Had not Alfonso el Sabio written chiefly in Castilian, thereby fixing that as the leading tongue, as Dante did the Tuscan in Italy, it is probable that the dialect of Galicia had prevailed. Portuguese and Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese writers in his studies of Spanish literature.

Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy mozo who seeks work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the love of its sons for it. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, prove this, and the nostalgia is strongest in those of Celtic origin. Ask the rude Gallegos of South America what is their ambition—'To return to the terriña and there die' is the answer."

In a collection of essays "De mi Tierra," Madam Pardo Bazán has told of the learned Benedictine, Padre Feijóo, the Bacon of Spain, whose caustic pen did away with so many of the superstitions of his age. It may be a bit pedantic for me to give biographies in these slight sketches, but it seems as if a truer idea of the race is conveyed in such lives than could be given in any other way. This native of Galicia, Padre Feijóo, had few equals in the Europe of his time in liberality of view. He was born of hidalgo parents near Orense, where his casa solar stands, still lived in by a Feijóo of to-day. He entered the Benedictine Order and in their cloisters passed most of his long life of eighty years, for half a century living in their Oviedo house. His unflagging industry, his clear intellect, and simple uprightness, won the admiration of all who knew him. "After fifteen years' intimate acquaintance with Feijóo," wrote a scientist of the day, "never have I met, inside religion or out, a man more sincere, more candid, more declared enemy of fraud and deceit." Not till he was fifty did Feijóo commence to write. In 1731 appeared the beginning of his "Teatro Crítico," essays that have been called the first step of Spanish journalism, written as they eminently were to communicate ideas to others. He had the passion to know why, a never-tiring love of investigation. Adopting the Baconian experimental method, he attacked the superstitions and pseudo-miracles around him. ¡Ay! de mí Inquisición! Were you asleep that you did not clap this independent thinker into your capacious dungeons? So strong was Feijóo's influence that Benedict XIV curtailed the number of feast days on his mere suggestion.

This learned Benedictine monk was ahead of his age in many ideas. Are the stars not inhabited? he asked. Before Washington, he maintained that the Machiavellian theory of government, intrigue and diplomacy, which was then universally accepted in Europe, was inferior to friendly loyalty and honor. He preached compassion to animals generations before the age of our modern, humanitarian theories. With the painful remembrance of the diligence ride in Galicia, I was glad to find one of her sons advocating this. Feijóo stands out more prominently because of the intellectual desert around him. "The eighteenth century was an erudite, negative, fatigued." The Bourbons brought formality and sterility to spontaneous Spain. A dry soulless learning killed the creative power, and in every branch, art, music, and literature, the artificial rococo flourished. The two exceptions of vitality were Feijóo and the painter Goya. Had Padre Feijóo lived in our age, he might have been that great man hailed by De Maistre: "Attendez que l'affinité naturelle de la science et de la religion les ait réunies l'une et l'autre dans la tête d'un homme de génie! Celui-là sera fameux et mettra fin au dix-huitième siècle qui dure encore." How much longer are we to wait for him,—this great man!

If the only harrowing scene of the tour in Spain is to be associated with Galicia, so is one of the happiest, a day of such kindly chivalry that we felt the spirit of Isabella's time still endured. It was the chance of railway travel that introduced a modern knight to us. The journey back to Castile from Galicia is a most trying one. Some day perhaps an enterprising ocean line will put in at Vigo and run an express directly across country to Madrid; we were too early for such ease. From Santiago we had to take an afternoon train to Pontevedra, and there spend the night. At 5 A.M. (oh, those unforgettable, dark, cold railway stations of Spain!) we again took the train. It was dawn before Redondela was reached, and exquisite as a dream seemed the rías, the fiords of Galicia, with wooded mountains sloping to their shores. It is not hard to prophesy that this will be a great summer resort of the future.

At Redondela we changed trains, getting into the express for Monforte, the only other occupant of the carriage being an elderly man, blue-eyed, very tall and erect, with the air of distinction so frequently found among Don Quixote's countrymen. We had noticed him the night before in the Pontevedra hotel, and had thought him an Englishman, till in offering some service about our luggage he spoke in Spanish. As we were to spend fifteen hours in the same railway carriage, we soon entered into conversation. He came from Madrid each summer with a family of sons and daughters to spend some months in a castle among the mountains of Galicia. Evidently he was a lover of sport and of country life, for as we ran alongside the Miño River, with Portugal just across on the opposite bank, for hours he sat gazing out in enjoyment, and drew each beautiful thing to our notice. At noon we reached Monforte, where we had dinner in the station buffet. When we called for our account, to our astonishment the waiter told us it was settled already. We could not understand what had been done, till the proprietor himself came to explain. It seems it is a custom all over this generous land, for a man when he is with a lady or has spoken to her, to pay for everything she orders; tea, luncheon, even her shopping purchases. He does this with no offensive ostentation, but so quietly that he often slips away unnoticed and unthanked. Several travelers have since told me that they too met this hospitality; it had at first embarrassed them, but as there was not the slightest impertinence nor even the personal about it, as it was merely an act of chivalrous respect, done with superb detachment, when the confusion of being paid for by a stranger was over, they remembered only the charming courtesy.

The attentions of our kind host, for he seemed to look on two strangers in his land as his guests, did not stop at noontime, at tea he brought us platefuls of hot chestnuts. He tried to while away the hours pleasantly, playing games on paper in French and English; with all his dignified gravity the Spaniard is not blasé. Our struggles to learn his tongue rousing sympathy, it was from him we first heard of the pretty high-flown phrases still in daily use, how you bid farewell with, Beso à V. la mano (I kiss your hand), or A los pies de V. (I am at your feet); that the Usted, shortened to V., with which you address high or low, is a corruption of "Your Majesty." Somehow there seems nothing absurd in addressing a Spanish peasant as "Your Majesty." The love of abbreviations is a curious trait in a people with such leisurely ways; thus, a row of cabalistic letters ends a letter: S. S. S. Q. B. S. M., which means that your correspondent kisses your hand—su seguro servidor que besa su mano.

Then the interest which we evinced in the institutions and progress of Spain made him put his cultivated intelligence at our service, and we learned more in a day than in all the previous weeks. When I inquired into the vexed religious question he was able to explain much. As a rule, republicanism in Spain means avowed atheism and socialism; it has been well said that the republicanism of all Latin countries turns to social revolution. The socialists are a small, but well-organized band, international in character since their movements are directed from centers like Paris. They are chiefly in industrial cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao, where secret societies of anarchists abound, disguised as clubs for scientific study. The majority being of the rabble, repudiating all authority, ("civilization, that is the enemy!") their disorders would be called mob uprisings did they occur in Chicago, but deceived by the term "republicanism," the journals of England and America gave them too lenient a consideration. By no means devout himself, he assured us that what we saw on every side was for the most part very genuine religion, not sentiment with no result; for in those places where observance had slackened there was a marked difference in moral restraint, so potent a factor for morality was religion still in Spain. That there were faults none denied, but he had traveled enough to know the flaws of other countries too well to be despairing of his own.

He wrote for us a card of introduction to the big hospital of Madrid; he sought out a friend in another carriage, the son of the Admiral in Ferrol, who was rather up in statistics. Had we seen the asylum near Santiago where the insane are treated with such success that noted cures had been obtained? Had we met the archæologist of the province, a canon in the Cathedral? In short, from the questions and suggestions we realized that the average tourist goes through this reserved country half blind. Glad were we for this chance of insight. When in the dusk of evening it came time to descend at Astorga, our stopping-place for the night, and our fellow-traveler stood there shaking hands, with warm friendliness in his blue eyes, we felt there was no more thoroughbred specimen of manhood than a Spanish hidalgo.

SALAMANCA

"L'homme n'est produit que pour l'infini."
"Il y a des raisons qui passent notre raison."
"Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosopher."
PASCAL.

SALAMANCA is in León province, and in comparison with the hour of its prime, as it is to-day it too is very like a sleeping city. It is hard to realize that this dull, small town was a grandeza de España, ranking with Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, that once 10,000 students flocked here from all over Europe, and every young Spaniard turned here as naturally as a modern Englishman to Oxford or Cambridge; Cervantes' "Novelas Exemplares" give the picture. To-day there are barely a thousand students, chiefly from its own province; among the ten universities of Spain the former leader takes a very lowly place. Madrid, the continuation of Cardinal Ximenez' University of Alcalá, may be called the modern Salamanca in intellectual leadership.

In the Spanish Oxford one looks in vain for the numerous colleges of the city on the Isis. Alas! Salamanca is half a ruin. The French, in the Napoleonic invasion, destroyed the whole northwest quarter of the town to make fortifications, undoing in a few brutal hours the work of centuries of culture and piety. In his despatches of 1812 the Duke of Wellington wrote: "The French among other acts of violence have destroyed thirteen out of twenty convents and twenty out of the twenty-five colleges which existed in this seat of learning." Twenty out of twenty-five colleges! The thought of Oxford's tranquil, age-crowned buildings makes one grasp the tragic wreck of the Spanish university; never while in Salamanca could I forget the desolate tract to the west, lying still a heap of ruins, untenanted save by wandering goats, those nomad creatures that give the culminating note of squalor to deserted districts.

Our train approached the city across the plains from Zamora, through plantations of isolated trees and past droves of black sheep whose guardian stood patiently under the rain. For some time in the distance we saw the prominent church towers. Salamanca lay on the old Roman road, the Via Lata, that connected Cadiz with the north, but the Roman associations here are slight. As in Zamora, the Cid and his feats dwarf other interests, so here it is the picturesque days of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that fill the mind.

Go down to the Roman bridge over the Tormes and while away an hour watching the passers-by, and the old times seem to live again. Below in the river bed women wash and chatter from morning till night, spreading the gayly-colored clothes, red, yellow, and purple, over the stones to dry. If it is Sunday, into the city pour the hardy peasants for their one day of rest from the ungrateful work of the fields: girls in pale blue woolen stockings and smart, black pumps sit sideways behind their cavaliers on the long-haired nags whose backs are often shaved into a pattern; now out of the city jogs a brisk old woman on her donkey, laden with a month's purchases, an unpainted rush-bottom chair topping the pile; she nods to the strangers, franceses, she thinks, for a Spaniard takes all foreigners for his neighbors over the frontier: now a cart passes, whose shape and hue seem taken out of a romantic watercolor; then a young peasant in wide-brimmed sombrero, leather gaiters, silver buttons as big as dollars on his vest, clear-eyed and proud of carriage: then, salt to the picture, rides a burly cura, sitting well back on his tiny ass, a ridiculous figure were it not for his sublime unconsciousness, his innate self-respect. Ever the unspoiled, the vigorous, the untamed! Just so they came into Salamanca in the past when students with swords and velvet capes walked the streets, and so I hope they may do some hundred years from now, for such lives of frugal contentment are unequaled. Localism and provinciality have been forced on Spain by nature, and it is this very provincialism which is her charm for the traveler. Fresh from a prosperous, new world, he may often long for certain changes here, for more widely diffused education, for free libraries, a more secure self-government; but such material prosperity is bought with a price. Remember that not in the length or breadth of this land are to be found the degraded human beings, vicious in soul and brutalized in shape of skull and feature, such as exist by the thousands in the slums of industrial countries. If the Spanish peasant must lose his hardy independence, if his frugal contentment, his heroic patience must pass with the old order of things (that lets a heap of ruins in the heart of a city lie untouched during a hundred years!) I cannot help wondering whether the price is not too high to pay. I am repeating myself, but the words come to one each day—it is beyond human nature to be consistent in Spain; she has the faculty, despite her glaring faults, of battering down one's Philistine certainty of northern superiority.

The bridge, the plaza, and the cathedral; study your types there and you begin to know the real Spaniard. Not soon shall I forget, at Mérida, in wild Estremadura, as I loitered on the bridge, a countryman stepping forward with the dignified, proud look of his class: "¿Es más bonita que París?" he asked, the interrogatory note added only in courtesy, so sure was he of my affirmative. Sleepy little Mérida, all a ruin, Knights Templars' castle as well as Roman theater and aqueduct, to the fellow paisano of Pizarro and Cortés, was finer than Paris. It is glimpses like this that make the prejudiced stranger judge the so-called backwardness of the country in kinder fashion. Where else could one see stately-moving cream-colored oxen pass unnoticed through the chief thoroughfare of a capital, a common sight in the Puerta del Sol of Madrid, where else will the customs officer of a big town stand to count with a pointing finger the skipping sheep driven past him, as on the Alcántara bridge at Toledo, where else will groups of goats be milked from door to door in a great commercial city like Barcelona? Salamanca, being the center of an agricultural district and off the express route, presents daily, scenes from the Georgics.

Architecturally the old university city, despite her disasters, is of first importance. She has two Cathedrals, the smaller more perfect one of 1100, finding shelter by the side of its huge successor, to whom it yielded its rights as metropolitan in 1560. The exterior of the new Cathedral is over-rich and meaningless, it promises little for what it holds within, where the lofty Gothic piers and arches have so impressive an air of majesty that architectural flaws are forgotten. It proves how much longer Gothic lasted in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. The triforium here is replaced by an elaborately-carved balcony that runs round the church, and high up are medallions colored with gold and Eastern hues, an enamel-like decoration which has been beautifully and sparingly used; the inner circle of the clearstory window and the round windows of the west end, have jeweled chains of color that modern churches could well imitate. As usual, the side chapels are full of treasures, and the sacristy boasts the very crucifix the Cid carried in battle. There is one bad defect: its apse has not the dim, mysterious curve of a cathedral, the east end being square, like a cold secular hall. Nestling under this gigantic pile is the loveliest thing in all Salamanca, the catedral vieja, its title in the old Latin proverb "fortis Salmantina." It is a small, Romanesque-transition church, unused, but in good repair, left unchanged by a sensible bishop when the services were removed to its more pretentious rival. The carvings of the capitals are boldly massive, there is a noticeably good, painted retablo, and among the numerous tombs—a Gregorovius could make a fascinating volume of Spain's alabaster knights and bishops!—there is one that is specially appealing. It is in a chapel opening off the cloisters; a warrior in armor lies on his sarcophagus, beside him his wife, with a child's innocence of face, dressed in the nun's robe worn while her lord was fighting the Moors, with high pattens on her feet, a dainty little Castilian gentlewoman, mother of the prelate whose stately tomb fills the center of the chapel. The old Cathedral is so tucked in among buildings, that only one view of the exterior can be got, from a terrace leading from the south door of the later church, a view that a New Englander will return to often with a homesick feeling, for just such a scaly-tiled tower, window for window, line for line alike, rises in Copley Square, Boston. This cupola shows Byzantine influences since Spanish Romanesque was orientalized through Mediterranean trading.

Of all the memories of a journey in Spain the happiest are the hours spent in her cathedrals, the starting out expectant, often with no map or book, for there are frequent glimpses of the church towers to guide; the first entering the noble structure which man's living enthusiasm raised, the first passing from one chapel to another in astonishment at the treasures they guard. Pierre Loti has a sketch on Burgos Cathedral, seen once only on a late afternoon, just as the verger was closing it, and he describes how unhappily he was affected by the lavish material wealth. Pure artist that he is in his theory of seizing on a swift impression, the test may be successful for Philae or for the Parthenon, but it will not do for a Spanish cathedral, which is too complex, and can well hide its soul from the hasty tourist. May M. Loti forgive me for saying it, but certainly the way in which he saw Burgos differs little from the lightning-flash method of the Yankee tourist he despises. I think he must have had a cross indigestion that late afternoon, or perhaps it was his Huguenot blood rising in protest. Another of his countrymen, equally sensitive, "le délicat Joubert," gives a less on-the-surface judgment: "The pomp and magnificence with which the Church is reproached are in truth the result and proof of her incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask, have come this power of hers and these excessive riches except from the enchantment into which she threw all the world? She had the talent of making herself loved, and the talent of making men happy ... it is from thence she drew her power."

Spain is richer than all other lands in church furniture: except for the uprising of 1835 against the monasteries, a movement more political than religious, there has been no terrible iconoclastic mania, such as in France and England; the cities which were looted, like Valladolid and Salamanca, during the French invasion, suffered in a different way. Then, too, Spanish cathedrals do not part with their art treasures; the gifts of personal and inappropriate jewels when they have accumulated too needlessly are sometimes sold for the benefit of the church, but the art treasures made for the service of the Altar are not parted with. In Valencia it is told that Rothschild's agent tried in vain to buy Benvenuto Cellini's silver pax there: $10,000 $15,000, $20,000, he offered: "Las cosas de la catedral no se venden," was the answer. "$50,000," said the agent. The Cathedral was poor and needed repairs. "It is useless," was the firm answer of the Chapter, "We do not sell the things of the Altar." In Salamanca the verger told us that an Englishman had offered an immense sum for the iron screen round the tomb of Bishop Anaya (his mother the dainty little lady in pattens) and though the screen was in an unused chapel of the catedral vieja, it was refused. These unsullied temples of the Holy Spirit, where stately ceremonials are still an every-day occurrence, differ in every city, the carven wealth of Burgos, the soaring grace of León, the solid grandeur of Santiago, Toledo, a dream of His House, Seville, rising imposing past expectation, the small, dark symmetry of Barcelona, the solemn space of prayer before Avila's high altar, Sigüenza's tomb-filled chapels, Saragossa, draped with priceless Flemish tapestries for the feast, Palencia dim and holy at daybreak, worship-bowed Lugo,—indelible memories of beauty and exaltation, the cathedrals of Spain are not mere artistic memorials of the past, their soul is not fled. Such churches cannot but have an influence on the people among whom they rise. If on one of different race they impress themselves with the actuality of a living experience, what must they mean to those whose childhood and old age have known them in solemn moments. I came across an autobiographical bit by the novelist Alacón, describing the influence on him of one of these great churches of the past. He grew up in the small Andalusian city of Gaudix, like many Spanish towns its great day being well over; the only grandeur left, the only palace inhabited, was the iglesia mayor: "From the Cathedral I first learned the revealing power of architecture, there first heard music and first grew to admire pictures; there also in solemn feasts, mid incense, lights, and the swell of the organ, I dreamed of poetry and divined a world different from what surrounded me. Thus faith and beauty, religion and inspiration, ambition and piety were born united in my soul."

On the way to the Cathedrals each day we passed through the arcaded plaza, which at the noon and evening hours was thronged with an animated crowd; we noticed once more the democratic relation between the classes, smart officers in pale blue uniforms strolled up and down chatting with plain countrymen whose capes, tossed over the shoulder, let the gaudy red and green velvet facing be seen. The daily walk brought us past the House of the Shells, whose walls are studded with the pilgrim emblem, and one day as I paused to look into the lovely inner court, the owner came out, prayer-book in hand, on her way to church, and with the grave courtesy of her race, she invited the stranger in to examine her romantic dwelling. Most of the buildings in the city are a light brown sandstone that suits the gorgeous surface decoration of Isabella's period, here seen in its full glory. There is no pure early-Gothic in the city; Romanesque-transition is found in the old Cathedral, and late florid-Gothic in the new Cathedral, later still some baroque extravagances, since Salamanca claims a doubtful honor as the birthplace of that exponent of bad taste, José Churriguera. But the style that is supreme here is the Plateresque, the silversmith period when late-Gothic and Renaissance met: the façades seem as if molded in clay, so lavish is their work. In one respect Salamanca has been more fortunate than its rival Oxford, in having used a stone soft in appearance, but so durable that the chiseling is almost as finished to-day as when first cut. Everywhere in the town this Plateresque work is found; at times more Renaissance than Gothic, as in Espíritu Santo, a convent like Las Huelgas for noble ladies, or as in the beautiful patio of the Irish College; the Dominican church of San Esteban is more Gothic than Plateresque.

Like the Jesuits, the second of the monastic orders whose cradle is Spain, may well be proud of the record in its native land. The society of Ignatius can boast besides its saints, scholars like Ripalda, Lainez, Salmerón, Isla, Suárez, Mariana, the great historian, and Hervás y Panduro, "the father of philology," who has been credited by Professor Max Müller with "one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language." And the Dominicans can claim a de Soto, a Melchor Cano, Luis de Granada, Las Casas, defender of the Indians, and, fame of this special monastery of Santo Domingo, a Diego de Deza, the protector of Columbus. With this learned man, tutor to Isabella's only son, lodged the discoverer years before his memorable voyage, and it was in a room called De Profundis, leading from the cloisters, that he first explained his theories to the community who espoused his cause with perseverance, in opposition to the stupid savants of the University. They, appointed by the Queen to investigate his claims, found them "vain and unpractical," not worthy of serious notice. On the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery, a memorial statue was put up in the square near the mediæval tower of Clavero: on the pedestal are reliefs of his two patrons, Isabella, and Fray Diego de Deza, "gloria de la orden de Santo Domingo, protector constante de Cristóbal Colón."

Imposing as is San Esteban, the triumph of the Catholic Kings' heraldic style of architecture is the façade of the University Library, as autobiographic of its age as is Santiago's Pórtico de la Gloria of an earlier century. It is one mass of delicate carving, badges, medalions, and scrolls, increasing in size as it rises, so that an effect of uniformity is obtained. There is the true ring of that chivalrous generation in the inscription, "The Kings to the University, and this to the Kings," you raise your head proudly with a flash of the eye, feeling for a moment that you are almost a Spaniard yourself.

Opposite the library's façade is a statue of one of the University's noted men, that attractive personality, Fray Luis de León. Tall, stalwart, for he came of a warrior race of Spanish grandees, ascetic, with intellectual forehead, a man capable of sainthood, of the type noble, he faces the school where he studied as a youth and passed a later life in research and teaching. In Luis de León is found an equilibrium of character, a magnanimity united with genius, which often distinguished the men born in the siglo de oro. This Augustinian monk was a deep theologian, ahead of his times, as most deep thinkers are; he made a translation of the Songs of Songs too advanced for the age, and his enemies accused his orthodoxy to the Inquisition. For five years he lived in confinement, and it was during this semi-imprisonment that he wrote his great mystic book, "Los Nombres de Cristo," and also some of his lyrics. The University remained loyal to him by refusing to place another lecturer in his seat; then when he had justified himself before the Holy Office, he was set at liberty, and a host of friends accompanied him back to his post. He entered the lecture hall quietly, after his five years of absence, and opened the discourse with rare tact, a generous, high-minded overlooking of personal rancour: "Gentlemen, as we were saying the other day." This famous mot of Luis de León, "como decíamos ayer," shows a quality unexpected in Spain, but characteristic often of her sons, that of amenity, a kindly tolerance of the world's foibles, found in Cervantes, and to show it has not died out, this same amenity was a predominating trait of the late distinguished novelist, Don Juan Valera. Luis de León, true follower of his patron Augustine, knew that there is no sin that one man commits that all men are not capable of, if not helped by God. "Even while he aspires, man errs."

Had the erudite monk been merely a scholar, he had been a personality in his own day, but would not be alive for us; but he can claim an enduring fame. Professor Menéndez y Pelayo calls him the most exalted of Spanish lyric poets, and names his "Ascensión," "Al Apartamiento," "A Salinas," "A Felipe Ruiz," "Alma Región Lucient," "La Noche Serena," as the six most beautiful of Spanish lyrics. Learn them by heart, he says, and they will astonish you with each repetition. Luis de León had the Wordsworthian note of simple living and high thinking, of a personal love of nature, long before the Lake School: the "Ode to Retirement" might have been penned at Grasmere. Everything led his soul to God; he fed on the mystics and rose to their height and serenity of thought. From his love of the classics came his sobriety of form and purity of phrase; he is a true Horacian, penetrated as well by the spirit of the great Hebrew writers, with the espíritu cristiano added, yet though drawing his culture from many sources he is personal and modern. Such praise from the great critic sends one to an enthusiastic study of Fray Luis, and a knowledge of his poems makes the visit to his tomb in Salamanca more than one of mere curiosity.

Like most of the cities and villages of León province, this one too lies asleep, resting on its former honors, though there are hints, such as the new hospital, that she is rousing herself to life. She feels a confidence in her own future, as is subtly shown in the decoration of the plaza, where empty spaces are left for the names of coming great men. It is with this city of the past that the most homelike memory of our tour in Spain is associated, the happy hour round an English tea-table eating bread and butter, and chatting at last, oh so eagerly, in one's native tongue. It was the rector of the Irish college who gave us this delightful taste of home, and fresh from six weeks of freezing, stone-paved rooms, of cinnamon-flavored chocolate, how we appreciated his hospitality! The school of young seminarians is housed in one of the five remaining of the University buildings, but only moved here when the original college, founded by Philip II and dedicated to St. Patrick, was demolished by Ney and Marmont's soldiery.

We found our host in his library poring over a Greek book with a professor from the University, and we were welcomed with the heart-warming kindness of his native land. The professor obviously hoped the invading Americans would not tarry long, but he little knew that a Celtic host in the heart of Spain and a cozy tea-table at the critical hour of a raw, bleak day made a combination not to be resisted; we lingered into the late afternoon and left reluctantly indeed. I would wish for all travelers a friendly visit to the Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses, that they might see the tall, northern-looking lads pacing up and down the sculptured sixteenth-century courtyard, might pause in the Chapel, and look out from the library windows over the city, with a genial cicerone to name the churches and colleges; then Salamanca would not seem a dead city, but a peaceful, contented survival of the past.

SEGOVIA.

"No hay un pueblo esclavo
Si no lo quiere ser:
¡Cantad, españoles!
Cantad! Cantad!"

(Hymn sung May, 1908, for the centenary of Dos de Mayo.)

WE reached Segovia at five o'clock in the early morning of November first after an indescribably fatiguing day and night of travel, the one confusion of our tour in Spain, and partly owing to a mistake in the usually reliable guide book. It may be of help to other travelers if I describe this misadventure. On returning from Galicia, we had left the express route at Astorga, and pausing there a night, took the local line south to Zamora and Salamanca. After a stay of some days in the old university city, we were lured out to a small town, fifteen miles away, Alba de Tormes, where St. Teresa died. It seemed unnecessary to return to Salamanca in order to go on to Avila, since a diligence ran to Avila from a town not far from Alba de Tormes. Our book gave the distance of this ride as fourteen miles, whereas fourteen leagues, more than three times fourteen miles, would be nearer the truth. For, on reaching Alba we found it was a diligence journey of over ten hours; with the roads in a frightful condition after a month's rain, the trip was out of the question. So spending the night at Alba de Tormes, we went back to Salamanca, there to find it was not the special day for the train that connects directly with the express route south. Whereupon it seemed best, rather than to wait a couple of days for this train, to take the long trip round by Zamora and Toro to the junction Medina del Campo, whence the express route to Madrid branches, one line passing by Avila, another by Segovia.

It happened to be eight minutes before the starting of the train, when I went to the ticket office at Salamanca with my carnet kilométrique, yet nevertheless the agent refused me the tickets, saying that his office closed five minutes before the starting of each train. "But there are yet eight minutes," I exclaimed. His personal watch said five; so we were obliged to start without the usual complementary tickets. We decided to descend at the first stop and there have our kilometrics torn off, but before reaching this station the conductor came to collect tickets, and by his face, false and mobile, we knew we were in for a struggle. We explained our dilemma and offered the one peseta, ninety centimes, which was marked in his book and our own, as the full first class tariff for twelve kilometers. He contemptuously refused and demanded eight pesetas each for that short ride of eight miles. We did not hesitate to refuse; whereupon when we reached the stopping station he tried by confused explanations to prevent the agent there from giving us the necessary complementary tickets. But fortunately in the hurry to procure them during the few minutes of our pause, I had stumbled in stepping from the carriage and slightly cut my hand on the pebbles. This roused the Spanish sense of chivalry and the agent moved aside the conductor and gave me what I asked. We again offered this latter the lawful fare for the eight miles we had ridden without tickets, and again he demanded eight pesetas. On reaching Zamora, he boldly brought up the Chief of that station, a trickster in league with him, and both demanded the unjust fare. A Spanish gentleman was passing, and seeing two ladies in trouble, stopped to ask if he could be of assistance. When we explained the case, he asked us to give him the lawful fare and turning to the station-master and the conductor, presented it to them with a scathing rebuke: like beaten dogs they slunk away. Several times gentlemen came to our aid in this way, as if it hurt their pride to have their race so misrepresented.

It is this petty thieving among a class that should be above it, such as postal clerks and railway officials, that rouses the traveler's harsh criticisms of Spain and makes him so unjust to her. The radical cure lies in the men being better paid, for their salaries are such pittances that many of them look on extortion as their right. The tourist can do something toward lessening the abuse, by firmly refusing to be cheated. Our experience was that firmness always won the battle; if one is of a fiery temperament there is a scene, if one is phlegmatic, one sits immovable as a rock and lets the other storm. If one yields finally one has the scene as well as the putting of oneself in the wrong.

To continue our day of ill-luck. From Zamora, we crawled along the dull, local line to the junction Medina del Campo, which we reached at eleven at night. We then changed our plans and got tickets for Segovia, deciding to leave Avila till later. At Medina we spent six weary hours in the waiting room, strolling up and down the windy platform, entering the buffet now and then to drink coffee, trying to rouse imaginative interest by thinking this was the spot where Isabella the Queen had died. But in vain, it was too dismal. How we abused Baedeker! And how we abused Spain and her railway system! Trains came and went, men muffled in their cloaks entered and left the dark waiting room, we the only impatient ones. A Spaniard accepts such things in full piety. Whoever heard of going faster than twenty miles an hour and what more natural than to wait in a station between trains half a night?

At two o'clock that raw windy morning we boarded the express to Segovia and finding the ladies' compartment full, for we were now on the direct route from Paris, we had to force ourselves into the carriage with two furiously cross, sleepy Frenchmen.

High, cold Segovia, almost 3,000 feet above the sea! A wind, de todos los demonios, was blowing that bleak first of November, and to give the final small touch of ill-luck, it lifted and bore away to the mysterious darkness outside, a treasured veil that the sun had at length toned to a rare tint. We stumbled into the ill-lighted station-buffet for more hot coffee, sending the luggage ahead to the sleeping hotel; for the faithful hotel-omnibus had been there waiting as usual. Strange memories remain of Spain's station restaurants,—the flitting waiters filling the bowls of coffee for the silent travelers, (no man is more silent than a traveling Spaniard);—frugal enduring scenes, not a touch of comfort, one eats to live indeed. "The French taste, the Germans devour, the Italians feast, the Spaniards se alimentan!"

As the dawn was breaking we left the station and walked, buffeted by the gale, through the mournful streets that lead to the town, passing on the way the Artillery Academy, where the country's crack regiments are trained. As we descended to the market place below the steep hill on which Segovia is built, a sight greeted us that repaid a thousand fold for the dreary day and night of unnecessary travel, for guide-book blunders, personal stupidity, dishonest officials, collarless, cross Frenchmen and even lost automobile veils. For there, rising one hundred and fifty feet in noble dignity and proportion, its boulders held together by their own weight, without cement or clamping, stood the giant Roman aqueduct that Trajan left his native land, and framed by its arches were hills, villages, and churches, under a sky of delicate rose. Never was there a lovelier sunrise, fragile, shell-like, dewy.

We climbed the steps that mount to the city beside the aqueduct, pausing again and again to look at the stupendous thing. Then we passed through quiet streets, with Romanesque doorways at every step (Segovia with Avila has the best portals in Spain) till we reached the hotel. Though, later, the night in Medina del Campo station revenged itself in a twenty hours' sleep, we were now too deeply fatigued to rest, and so soon were afoot again. A stone's throw brought us to the central square of Segovia, on one side of which is prominent the apse of the late-Gothic Cathedral. We pushed beyond it, here and there pausing to study some ancient doorway or to enter a carved courtyard, till at length the street ended in the big open space before the superbly set Alcázar, and we looked out on that memorable view.

With the towering Roman aqueduct on one side of the town and this Castle at the other, Segovia may claim to be one of the most picturesquely set cities in the world. The view from the Plaza de la Reina Victoria before the Alcázar is one of the unforgettable sights of the Peninsula, of the inmost fiber of Castile. On the horizon lies one of Spain's sad, isolated villages. A winding road leads to it, along which plod the familiar carriers of the land, brothers of Sancho's patient Rucio; the rocky hills stretch away, dotted with ancient churches. Close to the city lie oases of trees and gardens such as the monastery enclosure of La Parral, with its noticeable stone pines. The Alcázar with its bartizan towers is built on a lofty crag that rises like the prow of a giant ship above the meeting of two bosky little streams, the Eresma which yielded the "trout of exceeding greatness" whereon Charles I of England supped in this castle, and the peaceful brook, Clamores. Thus in one landscape are united hardy uplands, leafy parks, a mediæval town with church towers and fortified castle, making a scene whose individuality is beyond beauty, whose profound charm never palls. Here one communes with the silent, inner soul of Spain, the land of Isabella, of Garcilaso, of Teresa, of Cervantes, not a trace of whose spirit is found in Madrid, but in such spots as Toledo and Avila and this.

Segovia merits a prolonged stay. There were two Englishwomen in our hotel, who had passed months painting in the unfrequented city and found it a treasure house for the artist. It is full of Romanesque churches of the 11th and 12th centuries; so many are there that some are unused and falling into decay. The two best are San Martín and San Millán; the first, in the center of the town, surrounded by noticeable houses, has outside cloisters, that serve as a sunny lounging place for the people. From San Martín you can descend to San Millán by the steps beside the Plaza Isabel II. Apart from the church itself, with colossal animals carved on its capitols, the view from its porch is a most beautiful one, including the aqueduct, the Cathedral, and climbing houses, part of whose foundations it is plain to see are the apses of ancient churches.

Segovia's Cathedral is not Romanesque like most of her churches, but late-Gothic, designed by the same architect who did Salamanca's new Cathedral, and like it, though a poor thing exteriorly, the inside is dignified and effective: it is more fortunate than its sister church in having a curved east end, not Salamanca's cold hall-like apse. The cloisters of Segovia belonged to the earlier Cathedral; they were taken down and skillfully reset here; the pillars being elliptical in shape like Oviedo, are not thoroughly pleasing. In a chapel opening out of the cloisters is the touching, small tomb of the prince whose nurse dropped him by accident from a window of the Alcázar, back in the 14th century; and a good example of the countless rare tombs of Spain is the bishop, with an exquisite ascetic face of chiseled marble, who lies in the passage leading to the cloisters.

As we were in Segovia on All Saints' Day, we went to the celebration in the Cathedral, saw the prelate—the train of his red robe held by bearers—met at the church door by the canons and conducted in state to his throne. The vergers were very gorgeous; the leader carried a silver staff and wore a white wig and a white robe, his two assistants also in white wigs but with red velvet robes. The following day, All Souls', these vergers were dressed in mourning, and in the center of the black-draped church was placed, with true Spanish realism, a covered bier. On All Saints' Day there was really good music on the organ whose pipes flared out over aisles and choir; also an excellent sermon to which all listened in rapt attention, officers, peasants, and grave faced hidalgos standing in a characteristic group around the pulpit. The best way to learn Spanish and to learn more than the lip language of this race, is to listen to the sermons. Their eloquence is natural and contagious, and the peroration, delivered with brio, is often an artistic treat. Attend the sermons and frequent the early morning services, and you stumble on scenes of unobtrusive piety that tell you, despite some Spanish pessimists, that the soul of religion still lives in this land of the latest crusaders. As Sunday was the day we had set for the trip to La Granja, I went early to the Cathedral, and at Mass in a dark chapel of the apse, I watched long two gallant little lads of twelve and fourteen, smart in their artillery uniforms, swords, and white gloves. They went to Communion with their mother, who, like most Spanish women in church, was dressed in black with a draped veil, a fashion that lends an air of distinction to the plainest. This group of three remained to pray after the others had left the chapel, remained as a pleasure really to pray, the serious, high-browed, little faces bent over their books of devotion as they read the After-Communion devotions by the light of a tall candle placed on the floor beside them; then their blue eyes closed in such sweet, unconscious piety that it touched the heart strangely. And when, their prayers over, they left the Cathedral, each seized the mother's arm with a gay scamper of delight—she probably on a visit to them—and now for a whole day of vacation and enjoyment!

In the same uniform as the small Communicants of Segovia Cathedral, other embryo artillery officers fill the city. At our hotel was a table where a number of the older students dined each day. They were well-bred lads with inborn sedateness, never boorish nor loud-voiced; noblesse oblige still is a reality in spite of the dissipated, smart set in Madrid by which we too often generalize. I shall not soon forget the look of pained displeasure with which they watched the over familiar treatment of the waiter by a foreign lady.

It does not seem to me too harsh a statement to make that Spain's neighbor across the Pyrenees, has little of this chivalrous idealism among her boys. There are exceptions of course; the manly carriage of the brancardiers of Lourdes, those bands of young men who voluntarily serve as bearers of the crippled and stricken, show that a remnant still exists of the race of the Rochejacqueleins, of the Montalemberts, of those who can serve, unpaid, an ideal. Frenchmen themselves will not maintain that such are the average. Whereas the average Spanish, like the average English lad, has a strong dash of the Quixote and is capable of disinterested enthusiasm. Proof of this radical difference is that first important step in manhood, marriage. In Spain there is not the pernicious system of dowries; as a rule it is personal attraction that wins a husband. French people will assure you, that though one may be hump-backed and villainously ill-tempered, if there is a dot one is married; one may be grace and intelligence incarnate, without the dot one goes unwedded to the grave; the shrewd, interested love of money is in young as well as old. Spanish young people are romantic. Midnight serenades and evening hours of chatting by the reja are signs that hint marriage here is more than material settlement, love more than an impulse of nature; Spain's novels tell of this idealism. In many vital points the Spanish people are more akin to the English than to their Latin brothers.

The Sunday morning that we took the diligence for our country excursion started cloudless. La Granja lies seven miles outside Segovia, on the Guadarrama Mountains, and is the residence of the Court for part of each summer. The diligence rattled down the precipitous streets of Segovia, passed under the towering aqueduct, "the devil's bridge" the peasantry call it, then mounted the swelling hills to the palace at San Ildefonso. It had formerly been a farm belonging to the monks of La Parral; Philip V turned it into an artificial French pleasure ground, and built a formal chateau, a Bourbon creation that is strangely out of place on the rugged hills. The park is well-wooded but all rural charm is spoiled by the neo-classic fountains, some of them like monstrous dreams. Before we reached the leafy avenues of San Ildefonso, the sky became overcast and a heavy rain began. Five minutes after leaving the diligence we were so drenched that it seemed as sensible to explore the palace grounds as to pause chilled and wet in a miserable hotel. Then when we found the diligence did not return to Segovia till the evening and that no carriage would start in the storm, in an ill moment we decided to walk back to the city. A wind that cut like a knife made it a feat beyond our strength, and some miles along that bleak way, when a cart passed, we abjectly begged a passage. Yet, standing patiently under the drenching rain, oblivous to the tearing wind, the contented young shepherd girls watched their flocks.

If this poor imitation of Versailles has little in itself to charm the tourist, La Granja has been the scene of so many striking events in modern Spanish history that it merits a visit. It was there that Godoy, favorite of Charles IV's wife, signed away Spain to Napoleon, the criminal act that led to such glorious consequences. For then Spain, the country which had lain downtrodden under three centuries of misrule, shedding her blood in wars for her wretched kings' personal ambitions and giving her treasure for their extravagance, awoke suddenly to life when she found the king had outraged her. Two young heroes, Daoiz and Velarde, artillery officers, turned the cannon on the French invaders in Madrid, that memorable Dos de Mayo, 1808, and the War of Independence began, the starting point of regeneration, the second Cavadonga.

That outburst of national vigor has never had justice done it. We know the Peninsula War from the English point of view, a ceaseless disparagement of Spain's part in it.[16] It is true that without the English armies the war would have dragged on in disorderly, guerrilla fashion, for misrule had robbed the people of skill in self-government and organization. But remember the glorious year 1808, whose centenary all Spain was celebrating during the months of our visit, was before the arrival of Wellington's troops. The Dos de Mayo, the Battle of Bailén, where a Spanish general with Spanish troops brought about the surrender of twenty thousand of Napoleon's trained soldiers, and the sieges of Saragossa and Gerona, unmatched in all modern history for heroism, were in 1808-1809. It is just to remember that when Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia yielded in part to the invader, Spain stood firm against him, and the nation that Europe thought unnerved and debased "presented a fulcrum upon which a lever was rested that moved the civilized world."

La Granja has witnessed later historic scenes. When Charles IV betrayed his people, the nation chose as their king his son, the miserable Ferdinand VII, who ungratefully repaid their loyalty. Poor Spain, she has had kings who would have wrecked a less vigorous race. At La Granja, in 1832, Ferdinand VII changed his will and made his infant daughter, Isabel II, his heir, instead of his brother, Don Carlos, whom he had previously acknowledged, thus leaving behind him an inheritance of civil war. From the days of Urraca and Isabella the Catholic, women could inherit the throne in Spain, just as they can in England. But in the 18th century under the Bourbon kings, who loved all things French, the Salic Law was introduced and continued in force till Ferdinand VII changed it at La Granja. The king had a full right to revert to the earlier custom, as the Salic Law was an innovation in Spain, and the grandson of Ferdinand's daughter, Isabel II, the present young Alfonso XIII, is in truth the legitimate king of the Spains. Don Carlos, on Ferdinand's death, rose in rebellion, and for seven years a frightful, fraticidal struggle ravaged the country. This civil war, stamped out in 1840, again burst into flames during the disorders of 1872. To-day, however, the Carlist faction claims but scattered adherents, chiefly in the northern provinces. The peaceful termination of these troubles has been solidified by that noble and truly wise woman, the present queen dowager, María Cristina, whose strength of character and sincerity of aim may be said to have safeguarded her son's inheritance during his long minority.

Another scene took place at La Granja in the early years of Isabel II' reign, while her mother was regent, a far different regent from the later Cristina. Though the Constitutional factions had rallied round Isabel, as the Absolutists had gathered about Don Carlos, it was only through force, inch by inch, that the Spanish Crown yielded to the people's demand for a constitutional monarchy. Thus, at La Granja in 1836, the queen mother was intimidated by the army into affirming again the Constitution of 1812.

This last century in Spain has been a period of such ceaseless insurrection, such rapid, ill-considered changes of ministries, that it seems, on hasty survey, to be a hundred years of political chaos. Perhaps a slight sketch of the events may help to a better understanding, for running through the century, a thread to the labyrinth, is the nation's slow, stumbling, but ever forward advance to constitutional rule. With each disorderly, seemingly unconnected insurrection, a step ahead was taken, so that to-day an absolute monarchy is an impossibility in Spain. She may have taken longer than many European powers to shake off the incubus of the divine right of kings, but on the other hand, she has achieved her comparative independence without a king's execution or a terrible, bloody cataclysm. There has never been in Spain the bitter separation of nobles and people; together they both worked for their freedom, keeping a fraternal relationship that is uncommon in history. The Spanish temperament, like the English, has an intense loyalty and love of tradition; it finds its happiest condition under a monarchy, but the history of the 19th century shows it must be a constitutional monarchy; a modern king rules for the good of the people since he rules by will of the people.

To give a hasty sketch of political progress. Godoy, Charles IV's unscrupulous minister, brought Napoleon's armies into Spain under the pretext that they were on their way to conquer Portugal. When some seventy thousand French troops were on Spanish soil and the people found their king a slave to the so-called visitors, they suddenly awoke to the truth, the tocsin of alarm sounded in Madrid, and from one end of the land to the other they took up arms. Then followed the Guerra de la Independenzia, 1808 to 1814, that proved to Europe Spain was alive and vigorous, again in the arena of the world's struggle. During the war a representative body met at Cadiz, thus renewing the Cortes that had flourished before the Hapsburg dynasty stamped it out. At Cadiz, in an outburst of patriotism, the Constitution of 1812 was drawn up: for the invader, war to the knife; Ferdinand VII to be their lawful king; abuses such as the Inquisition abolished; the sovereignty of the people upheld; "religión y rey, patria é independencia," truly Spanish watchwords.

When in 1814 Napoleon was forced to accept Ferdinand VII as King of Spain, that ungrateful king came back to his loyal people, and his first act was to restore the absolute monarchy of his ancestors, to declare the Constitution of 1812 null and void, to try to galvanize the Inquisition into life. It was not long before the disorders of his government led some of the colonies in America to declare their independence, and finally Spain too uprose. The Riego insurrection of 1820, proclaiming again the Constitution of 1812, was the first of the frequent pronunciamientos (the uprising of the army against absolute monarchy) that continued down to 1870. Louis Philippe declared this insubordination of the army a menace to other thrones of Europe, and took this pretext to send French troops into Spain to uphold Ferdinand's absolutism: the Trocadero defense was during this second invasion of the French.

Always ceaselessly agitating, despite temporary defeat, went on the people's struggle for a constitution. While Ferdinand VII lived there was little hope for modern ideas, but when he died, the Constitutionalists espoused the cause of his infant daughter, Isabel II. All advance was retarded by the Carlist War that followed Isabel's accession, during which war occurred what a Spanish quaker has called the "pecado de sangre," the brutal massacre of the monks and destruction of such unrivaled centers of art as Poblet in Catalonia, more a political act than a religious, as the monks were Carlists. This war so confused and embittered the issues at stake that it is difficult to follow with consistency the political parties. The government was consistent only in its instability, having now a Queen Regent, now an Espartero, banishments, executions, riots, barricades, revolts,—it seemed indeed as if Spain were sown with Cadmus teeth.

Still through the darkness one can follow a light. The Constitution of 1837 asserted boldly the sovereignty of the people. Though the Constitution of the forties was lenient to absolute power, the Cortes was now included in the government, a marked advance since Ferdinand VII's day. The Constitution of the fifties was a further advance toward national independence. In the midst of political rancors, the war with Africa, 1860, came as a noble interval when feuds were put aside and all fought together against a common enemy. As in the old days, poets and novelists enrolled themselves in the army, and the young grandees served as common soldiers, in fidelity to the vow of their ancestors, knights of Santiago, of Calatrava, and of Alcántara, that when Spain was threatened by the Saracen, their descendants would serve in the ranks, on foot, and in person.

Then, this brilliant war over, the old strifes returned in force, Prim, O'Donnell,[17] and twenty minor parties. Queen Isabel II was banished in 1868, and the first interregnum since Spain was a monarchy occurred. Then followed the short-lived rule of Amadeus I, Duke of Aosta and son of Victor Emmanuel, called by invitation to rule in Spain. His chief upholder, Prim, was assassinated before Amadeus reached Madrid, and the new king found himself in so equivocal a position, that after two unhappy years he resigned gladly. Under the influence of Castelar, most brilliant of orators and a man who sincerely loved his country, a Republic of two years' duration followed. Spain was never intended for a republic; discontent continued general, the ministry changed eight times in this short period, and at length all warring factions agreed that the only hope for stable government lay in the restoration of Spain's lawful king, Isabel II's eldest son.

Isabel in Paris abdicated in his favor, and in 1875 Alfonso XII returned to his native land. He came not in the same spirit as had Ferdinand VII in 1814. The sixty years of disorders had led to a solid result, Alfonso XII came back as a constitutional king. The Constitution of 1876 was a reconciliation of monarchical principles and those of a democracy. The new king died before he had reached the age of thirty, and his son Alfonso XIII, born after his father's death, was represented by his mother till his majority. To María Cristina of Austria, Spain owes an unending debt of gratitude. Under her wise rule the country had some years of the peace she so needed; and even what is termed disaster, the recent loss of colonies, is a blessing in disguise. Spain to-day needs all her strength for herself.

As the abuses of centuries are not reformed in a year and as nothing on earth can be perfect, there is much to be desired still in Spain's political life. Her constitution is an excellent one in theory, but in practice it is crippled by the dishonest elections. Political power is left in the hands of an unscrupulous minority who work for personal, not national aggrandizement, and the distrust such elections have engendered keeps the better element of the people aloof from the government. Only fifteen per cent of the Spanish people vote. The king has, like England's ruler, the right of absolute veto. If Spain is now so blessed as to have for her king a worthy descendant of Isabella the Catholic, the remedy for the political dishonesty may be close at hand. Young Alfonso XIII has an intelligence of the first order; he has been trained under a high-minded and truly Christian woman; he has married the daughter of a race that well understands constitutional rule; personally he is loved by his people with an affection not hard to understand, for despite his thin, plain face, the young king is eminently distinguished and simpático. Often in Seville, seeing him galloping back from polo, or returning from a week's hunt in the wilds of the sierras, our intense hopes went out to him. In his hands, it is slight exaggeration to say, lies Spain's future. If Alfonso XIII gives his intelligence and life-blood to his people, who can foresee to what heights this strong, uncontaminated race may climb? The past century's outburst in literature and art hint the possibility of a second siglo de oro.

La Granja has led me far afield. It does not stand for Spain's best, an artificial, foreign creation where passed hours of the nation's abasement. Segovia is the real Spain. Descend from the Alcázar to the river, cross the bridge, mount to the ten-sided chapel of the Knights Templars, and sitting on the steps of the granite cross, look back on the stretching city. There lies the Spain whose fiber is capable of regeneration: generous, patient, indomitable, faulty, but with manly faults, untouched by taint of luxury and greed, with blood in her veins, and ideals in her soul. Wander down by the Eresma past the hermitage, and encircle the town by the footpath beside the tree-hidden Clamores. High above, its yellow stones gleaming in the sunset light, rises the fortress which stood firm for Isabella in her critical hour, and from whence she started in state to claim her heritage. Will the young king of Spain to-day show the world that Isabella's heritage is worth the claiming?

SAINT TERESA AND AVILA

"All great artists are mystics, for they do but body forth what they have intuitively discerned: all philosophers as far as they are truly original are mystics, because their greatest thoughts are not the result of laborious efforts but have been apprehended by the lightening flash of genius, and because their essential theme is connected with the one feeling, only to be mystically apprehended, the relation of the individual to the Absolute. Every great religion has originated in mysticism and by mysticism it lives, for mysticism is what John Wesley called 'heart religion.' When this dies out of any creed, that creed inevitably falls into mere formalism."

W. S. LILLY.

MYSTICISM is St. Teresa's highest glory. To write of her with admiration and even enthusiasm, leaving untouched this acme of her genius, as certain of her biographers have done, is to describe the shape, the hue, the grace of a rose and omit to tell of its scent. On all sides her character was notable; in strength of will, in that most uncommon of qualities, common sense,[18] in vigorous administration, in sincerity of purpose. Carmelite nun and restorer of the strictest order of Carmelites, she was not in the least a withered ascetic but a well-bred Castilian lady of winning manners and pleasing appearance, who in courtesy, dignity, and simplicity, embodied in herself the best of Castile. From every word she wrote breathes a generous character. Her robust virility of mind, her complete absence of sophistry or of self-consciousness, help us to understand the love she roused among her nuns, and the respect she gained from the foremost men of her time.

"We cannot stir ourselves to great things unless our thoughts are high," wrote this soul of heroism. Yet, with all her supremacy of intellect, Teresa was so delicately witty, so gay—peals of laughter were often heard in her cloisters—so shrewd, that never in her was found the least trace of the pretentious. Anecdotes are told of her practical good sense. The first night of the foundation in Salamanca, in the solitary garret when the frightened little nun, her companion, exclaimed, "I was thinking, dear Mother, what would become of you, if I were to die," "Pish," said Teresa, who disliked the exalté, "it will be time to think of that when it happens. Let us go to sleep." Then her vehement protest to those who thought prayer alone sufficient for salvation: "No, sisters, no: our Lord desires works!" Her swift sweeping aside of the aristocratic spirit in her convents; let there be no talk of precedence, "which is nothing more than to dispute whether the earth be good for bricks or for mortar. O my God, what an insignificant subject!" "I have always been friendly with learned men," she wrote, and pleasant milestones in her burdened life are her interviews with some remarkable minds of the time. "Knowledge and learning are very necessary for everything, alas!"—This last exclamation made in naïve apology that she could only translate in halting language her inner life of the spirit, she whose witchery of style makes her read to-day even by the scoffer.

The human personality of the saint lives in her writing, where is found the fragrance of her own special soul. "I cannot see anyone who pleases me but I must instantly desire that he might give himself entirely to God, and I wish it so ardently that sometimes I can hardly contain myself." "Humility alone is that which does everything, when you comprehend in a flash to the depth of your being, you are a mere nothing and that God is all." "Oh, Lord of my soul! Oh my true Lord, how wonderful is Thy greatness! Yet here we live, like so many silly swains, imagining we have attained some knowledge of Thee; and yet it is indeed as nothing, for even in ourselves there are great secrets which we do not understand." "Do you know what it is to be truly spiritual? It is to be the slaves of God; those who are signed with His mark which is that of the Cross." And that supreme cry of the saints in all ages: "¡Señor! ¡O morir ó padecer! My God! either to suffer or to die!"

It is inevitable sacrilege for anyone in this generation, which has traveled so far from the days of faith, to touch on Teresa's raptures and locutions, for in sheer ignorance we profane what is holy. The saint herself foresaw our difficulty. "I know that whoever shall have arrived at these raptures will understand me well; but he who has had no experience therein, will consider what I say to be foolish.... However much I desire to speak clearly concerning what relates to prayer, it will be obscure for him who has no experience therein.... Some may say these things seem impossible, and that it is good not to scandalize the weak.... I consider it certain that whoever shall receive any harm by believing it possible for God in this land of exile to bestow such favors, stands in great need of humility; such a person keeps the gate shut against receiving any favors himself." So unparalleled was her life of ecstasy that at first the saint doubted if it were heaven sent or not; she submitted herself humbly to the tests of that inquisition age till at length her own good judgment told her that this "joy surpassing all the joys of the world, all its delights, all its pleasures," was from God, because of its after-effects, an added peace, a deeper humility, a more ardent and practical love of souls. But her clear brain and transcendent honesty made her see the risk for weaker minds: "The highest perfection," she warns, "does not consist in raptures nor in visions, nor in the gift of prophecy, but in making our will so conformable with the will of God that we shall receive what is bitter as joyfully as what is sweet and pleasant."

Mysticism skirts indeed perilous precipices, but St. Teresa walked the narrow path securely, her eyes uplifted, oblivious of the dangers below. I dare not touch on her marvelous life of the spirit.[19] All I can say is, go to her own works, read them in their pure, native Castilian, do not be content with the few extreme quotations given perhaps by those who would discredit her; read her in various moods, as you do the "Imitation," and I doubt if she fails to convince you that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our negative philosophy, that a few rare souls have risen to supreme heights because they were really humble and really holy, that religion has preserved from total loss the subtlest faculty of man, and faith stood up bravely through centuries of intellectual contempt to battle for it. Recently I came across a review of some works on psychology by that able young English novelist, Robert Hugh Benson; it ended with these suggestive words:

"In Psychology, science and religion are very near to one another, for its subject is nothing else than the soul of man. Science in her winding explorations has been for centuries drawing nearer to this center of the maze: she has traversed physical nature, the direct work of God, and philosophy, the direct product of man.... Is it too much to hope that when science has advanced yet a few steps more she may have come to Faith with the human soul newly discovered in her hands: 'Here is a precious and holy thing that I have found in man, a thing which for years I have denied or questioned. Now I hand it over to the proper authority. It has powers of which I know little or nothing, strange intuitions into the unseen, faculties for communication which do not find their adequate object in this world ... a force of habit which is meaningless if it ends with time; an affinity with some element that cannot rise from matter as its origin. Take it from my hands for you alone understand its needs and capacities. Enliven it with the atmosphere it must have for its proper development, feed it, cleanse it, heal its hurts, train it to use and control its own powers, and prepare it for Eternity.'"

Let the reader before he opens the "Way of Perfection" know the saint's "Life"[20] which she wrote, by the advice of her superior, when forty-six years of age; it is an autobiography worthy to rank with Augustine's "Confessions." Read also the few hundred racy letters written after the press of the day while the convent slept. Chief of all, let the reader, if he is practical, know that inimitable book of her fifty-eighth year, the "Foundations," with its Cervantes-like pictures of the people and customs of the time. Perhaps only those who have traveled on Spanish country-roads, those tracts of mud or rocks, can appreciate the hardships endured by this aged woman as she went from city to city to found her houses; in heavy snows to Salamanca; to Seville in a covered cart turned to purgatory by the direct rays of the Andalusian sun, with fever and only hot water to drink; rivers overflowed by heavy rains; boats upset in the rivers. The last foundation was at Burgos, barely four months before her death, the jolting cart in which she rode from Palencia having to be pulled out of the ruts and she entered the coldest city in the Peninsula on a raw January day in a heavy rain, there to find further troubles.

Familiar with Teresa's physical endurance, her cool-headed business ability, her candid hatred of shams and pretence, then approach her loftier self and read the "Camino de Perfección." The treatise on prayer in the "Life," (Chap. XI to XXII) prepares one for this second book, which she wrote for her sisters and daughters of "St. Joseph's" in Avila, "those pure and holy souls whose only care was to serve and praise Our Lord, so disengaged from the things of the world, solitude is their delight." Through the "Way of Perfection" runs her beautiful exposition of the Pater Noster, with digressions to right and left as her thoughts arose. She tells of the intangible land of worship in magic-laden words that draw the cold heart to the far realm of contemplation wherein lay the source of her strength. The "Camino" leads one to her last book, the "Interior Castle," a glorious pæan to God, a courageous exploring of the untrodden realms of the soul that is truly one of the triumphs of the spirit, and when we consider it was written by a woman of sixty-two, worn out with labors and penance, living in a poor little convent, it is an incredible feat of genius. In all literature is found nothing loftier nor more ethereal: "Oh, 'tis not Spanish but 'tis Heaven she speaks!"

Teresa belonged to the race of the true mystics because she was a great saint. It has been said that sainthood, the divine hunger of the soul to do or to suffer pro causa Dei is as difficult to define to the imagination as genius. The materialist may scoff at it, but it remains a primitive part of human nature against which argument beats itself in vain. Its form may change with the times, the Eastern anchorite and the mediæval ascetic may give way to the administrative bishop needed in his age; to a knightly paladin such as that "Raleigh among the Saints" who led his Free Lances to the fight for the salvation of souls; to a large-hearted philanthropist like Vincent de Paul, with his unresting Sisters of Charity; to a scholar of the schools, a Newman; to the reformer in our ugly modern cities; under varying vestures the spirit is the same. In the compelling power of her saints lies the force of the Church; to the saints of the Catholic Reformation, to Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Francis Borgia, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, the Church owes her rehabilitation. These great souls rose in every land to purify abuses, to drive the money changers from the temple: they were the leaven in the hundred measures of meal. Macaulay noted the fact that since the middle of the sixteenth century Protestantism has not gained one inch of ground, and this is due to these saints of the Catholic Reformation; for deep in man's heart lies a reverence for simple goodness that overrides all disputes, and when such saints arose in the church that was called a sink of iniquity, men paused; those who had passed from her ranks did not return, but none after followed them. Had Luther been gifted with more of this personal sainthood, the fatal division that bequeathed centuries of hate and warfare might have been avoided, and the simpler method of example, of holiness of life, have sufficed for reforming Renaissance Rome intoxicated with the revival of pagan culture. Such regrets are futile, a mere weighing the weight of the fire, a measuring the blast of the wind; and they are ungrateful, too, since the spirit of that troubled time roused among other great souls, a Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada.

The writings of this remarkable woman have the same allurements for us to-day as when they flowed almost unconsciously from her pen, for besides her mysticism and her sainthood, she was a poet, of the race of those whose thoughts make rich the blood of the world. Her little nuns tell that when she wrote her hand moved so rapidly, it seemed hardly possible it could form human words, while in her face was an expression of exaltation. "She ranks as a miracle of genius, as perhaps the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who stands beside the world's most perfect masters," is the testimony of the ablest English critic of Spanish literature. She wrote with her eye direct on her soul's experience, with the glorious courage to give the naked truth regardless of consequences, and she will be read as long as sincerity of soul-expression is the poet's best gift and while the conflict of faith and unbelief remains the highest of human themes.

Mystic, saint, and poet, she can claim yet another title, that of philosopher. By the road of self-study, she reached that sublime height of metaphysics, the intellectual vision of the Absolute. The further Psychology advances, the more wonderful is found her knowledge of the soul and its moods and powers. "The highest, most generous philosophy that ever man imagined," wrote the scholar, Luis de León. "Sainte Térèse a exploré plus à fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l'âme, ... elle explique savamment, clairement, le mécanisme de l'âme évoluant dès que Dieu la touche ... une sainte qui a vérifié sur elle-même les phases sur-naturelles qu'elle a décrites, une femme dont la lucidité fut plus qu'humaine" is the appreciation of Huysmans. Not only orthodox believers yield her this preëminence: Leibnitz read and deeply admired her; a recent French critic of the skeptic school compares her to Descartes. Hyperbole is inevitable in speaking of this "sweet incendiary," and all who know her books feel the same enthusiasm. "A woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman," wrote the old English poet, Richard Crashaw, whose "Flaming Heart" is touched with her own potency:

"Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
And by thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;...

By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him,
(Fair sister of the seraphim!)
By all of Him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me,
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may die."

Spain may claim the glory of having appreciated this her greatest daughter. She is a colonel of artillery; she is a doctor in Salamanca; the manuscript of her "Life" was placed in the Escorial and the King carried the key; at country inns they tell of the night she rested there, as if it had been yesterday; her devotees to-day sign their letters "su amigo teresiano." It was reserved for later generations of different race to explain what they could not understand by calling it hysteria and epilepsy. Richard Ford's account of the saint is so wide of the original that Froude, no lover of Catholic Spain, says it is not even a caricature; the article on her in the Encyclopedia Brittanica is a disgrace to intellectual thought.

Spain stands indifferent to such criticism. She knows herself secure in her mystics who seem to have left the race an intuitive understanding of the life of the soul. This inherited intuition has, of course, its dangers, for all intelligences are not those of a Teresa de Jesús. It needs indeed "large draughts of intellectual day" to be a mystic. Valdés' novel, "Marta y María" shows this mistaken insisting in the nineteenth century on conditions of life suitable to the sixteenth. But because smaller minds have imitated her disastrously, their neo-mysticism need not be considered a serious menace in modern Spain, since following a saint, even haltingly, is not by any means an easy life to choose.

St. Teresa and Avila: her name evokes that of her native city as instantly as St. Francis' that of Assisi; every stone in Avila breathes of the heroic woman. Our first visit was to the small plaza under the city walls, where the casa solar of the Cepeda family stood. Teresa came of the untitled gentry of Castile, de sangre muy limpia, and a Spaniard's pride in his blood, untouched by Moorish taint, by crime, or illegitimacy, is as strong to-day as then: perhaps it is this pride, in peasant as well as noble, that makes the democratic relation of the classes in the Peninsula.

At right angles to the mediocre church built in commemoration, on the site of the Cepeda house, stands the mansion of the Duque de la Roca, which gives a good idea of the solid escutcheoned homes of the hidalgo. Many such dignified houses are scattered over Avila, making a stroll in her streets full of the charm of surprise; their chief adornments are the doorways, truly splendid old portals with coping stones sometimes nine feet deep radiating round the entrance. In one of these solid Romanesque houses Teresa was born in 1515. Through a city gate before her house, I looked out on just the same scene she had known during the first eighteen years of her life; the rocky plain, through which the river wound, stretched to a spur of the Guadarrama mountains, capped already with the winter's snow. Leaving the venerable little plaza, I descended the steep street that led to the river bridge, in the spirit of pilgrimage still, for the child Teresa and a small brother wandered here alone one day on their way to seek martyrdom among the infidels. Met by an uncle beyond the bridge, the runaways were brought home. Truly in the saint's life, the child was father to the man, her days bound each to each in natural piety, despite that short period which her too tender conscience ever regretted when, as a pretty girl, love of fine clothes and flattery allured her. It is told of these remarkable children, that, hearing the word "Forever," they clasped their little hands and gazed wide-eyed in each other's faces, overcome by its stupendous meaning.

When Teresa was eighteen she went to visit a married sister who lived at a distance, and on her return stopped to see an uncle who had just taken the resolution of entering a monastery. The religious feeling in her partly awoke, and she too desired the life of the cloister, but her parents not finding strength to part with her, one morning she and a brother slipped away from home, and after he had conducted her to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, he went on himself to beg admittance at the Dominican Convent of St. Thomas. For over twenty-five years Teresa lived in the Encarnación: during the first twenty years she was miserable in bodily health and as miserable in spirit, for the saint had not yet found her vocation, and the laxity of the rule allowed the nuns to see much of the world, to receive visitors and hear the gossip of the town. "I was tossed about in a wretched condition, for if I had small content in the world, in God I had no pleasure. At prayer time I watched for the clock to strike the end of the hour." Strange words for this future great genius of prayer! Her conversion, the change of heart that sooner or later, disregarded or welcomed, comes to all who live with any depth, came to Teresa as she was approaching her fortieth year. She had been roused to more serious thoughts by her father's death, and one day in the oratory she suddenly seemed to realize in a figure of her crucified Saviour the unspeakable wonder of his sacrifice:

"Thy hands to give Thou can'st not lift.
Yet will Thy hand still giving be,
It gives, but O, itself's the gift,
It gives tho' bound, tho' bound 'tis free."
———
"Love touch't her heart, and lo! it beats
High, and burns with such brave heats
Such thirst to die, as dares drink up
A thousand cold deaths in one cup."