stuck in its front; and after this a blind
fellow playing a guitar, and led by a Murillo-like
child, who always contrives to pitch for
the time near a fruit-stall, where a beggar-
sort of vendor peels prickly pears as quick as
a fishmonger opens oysters.

The Cadiz Spaniards cling very much to
their Carthaginian ancestors, to judge by the
names of the Cadiz streets, which are, as in
Seville, labelled Hamilcar, Hanno, Hasdrubal;
just as we call our great London streets after
our own great men, Bacon, Newton,
Shakespeare, Cowper, Johnson, and not after mere
earthworm builders or unfortunate rich men.
The Spanish street names are always indeed
sonorous or sacerdotal; ringing out with a
processional majesty and stamp of empire:
as the Street of Manuel Henriquez, or the
Rua de Villalobos. Sometimes they have a
mediæval solemnity and quaintness about
them, as the Street of the Five Wounds, the
Street of the Seven Sorrows, the Plaza
Jesus-Nazaren, the Street of Saint Elmo
(the sailor's saint), the Five Towers, the
Rosary, the Pirates, the Doubloons, the
Wine-Skins—all characteristic and suggestive
names. I even bought a little cobweb map of
the ham-shaped city, and jotted down the most
picturesque and national names as a warning
to the nation that calls its streets King Street
and William Street and Cannon Street and
such insipid names. I noted the streets of
Consolation, of the Three Men, of the Cross,
of Saint Dimas (the penitent thief), of God's
Blessing, of Calvary, of the Capucins, of the
Emperor, of the Flemings, of Saint Gines, of
the Apple, of Hercules (founder of Cadiz), of
Saint Ines. But, these are not a whit more
picturesque than those of old Paris, where
there was the Street of the Armed Man; or
of Naples, that has its Street of the Marble
Foot; or Rome, that has its Street of
Madame Lucretia and the Three Robbers;
or a certain old dirty brick Babylon, that, with
all its Jones Terraces and Laburnum Villas,
has still some old-world nooks, fragrant with
the names of Bleeding Heart Yard and Lilypot
Lane, and certainly fragrant with nothing
else.

Cadiz, then, has besides these older streets,
its brand new squares, where the bands
triumph and dominate of summer evenings,
on a green-shelved scaffold, under the light
of golden-flowered lamps that scorn the
sharp-rayed stars cutting the blue darkness
above them. This is the square of San
Antonio, with low stone seats all round it—
low iron-backed seats, where you sit and tip
off the white column of ash from your cigar
against the end of your boot, and try and look
as if you saw nothing as Pedro's cheek comes
so very near the brown-redness of Juanna's,
that you really wonder the fat, comfortable,
old burgess of a father, who is talking
patriotism with the thin neighbour on the next
seat, does not make some remark.

This is the square, where in sixteen hundred
and forty-eight (there is no doubt in Cadiz
about it), the figure of the saint came down
from its pedestal (in a high wind) to succour
and heal some poor stricken water-carriers.
Nobody can disbelieve it, for there is the
clearest possible evidence (much more clear
than about the Commandant's statue in Don
Juan) that the saint was seen getting down
from his pedestal and getting up again. Ask
at any of those fizzling fry fish shops, that
flame purgatorially at night, and they will tell
you, with any number of oaths you may
require, that greater miracles have been done
here than anywhere in Spain. Why there was
one local saint who was not quite sure if it was
right to attempt to perform a miracle, and
save a mason who was falling from a scaffold
in the Franciscan church; so he went home
and prayed to the Virgin, and the answer came
that it was right. So off he posted back to
the church, expecting to find the man dead, and
intending to rub him all over with the great
Arab doctor Ben Hollowaway's ointment.
To his wonder and delight, he found the man,
by the Virgin's aid, suspended in mid-air;
and he stretched out his hand and drew him
back on the scaffold. This is nothing; for
Saint Vincent swam down a river on a millstone,
to which the Moors had tied him. And
even this is a trifle to the miracle of Father
Joseph, of the Convent of the Bleeding Heart,
at Seville; for he, one burning day in July,
having forgotten the dinner hour in the
refectory, went out in the olive garden of the
convent; and, holding a raw beefsteak in his
hand, held it up to the sun, which, focussing
instantly upon it, cooked it in exactly three
minutes. His absurd calumniators, indeed,
hating and fearing truth, and materialists to
a man, go so far as shamelessly to impugn the
splendour of this miracle, and to assert that
the saint took the steak out with him ready
cooked. But even this great proof of the
triumph of our faith pales before the great
and crowning proof of Christian charity,
given us by Brother Lorenzo, of the Minorite
Convent, at Bilboa, who, one day, going into
a vineyard to eat grapes and meditate alone
(Nanita, of the neighbouring posada of Villa
Dolces, is the witness of this miracle), held
out his hand, as men do, to see if it rained:
at that moment, a thrush from a neighbour-
pomegranate tree flew down and laid an egg
in the cup of his hand, then accidentally
hollowed into the shape of a nest. The holy
man, praying for aid with divine patience,
actually waited till the whole five eggs were
laid and hatched, and the grateful bird, in
the presence of Nanita and thousands of
peasants, flew to the nearest fig tree, changed
itself into an angel, and sung the Nunc
Dimittis or Song of Simeon.

After such miracles as these, it is quite
ridiculous to disbelieve the story of the
statue merely coming down from its pedestal.
So we Spaniards, breathing out cigar-smoke,
oaths and prayers alternately, talk of the