unclaimed letters; every third one being
directed to some German Jotz,and the English
ones being all re-directed in Spanish to Senor
Don, Esquire, Spanish officials at hotels,
custom-houses, and post-offices always
suppose Esquire to be a name; and I hurry off to
the cathedral for fear it should be shut for
the siesta, wanting shade and a quiet place
where I may settle what I shall have for
dinner.

Far at sea, those two Corinthian florid
towers look as if they were cut out of
Windsor soap, and seem close to the blue
wave that scoops the shore: "Begun in fifteen
hundred and thirty-eight; finished in seventeen
hundred and nineteen," says the red
guide-book. The way of Spain,—one tower
capped; the other, unfinished, as a precaution
against the evil eye, just like the cathedral
at Seville. The way of Spain again;
red marble pulpit like an egg-cup—very
good! fluted Corinthian pillars—good, again!
altar major—so, so. A poor opera-house of a
church, and tawdry enough after that great
cave of a cathedral at Seville, that dark ark
with its ninety-three portholes, paned with the
eternal flowers of Paradise. That church, like
this, was raised on the site of a Moorish mosque.
Blessing on the wise builder who reared that
pile to God, and, unchurchwarden-like, left
no record even of his name! How small one
seemed—small as a mite inside a Stilton—
pacing over that world of stone, with its
giant pillars, screened by sculptured marble,
groves of carved wood-work, its countless
images, pictures, and bas-reliefs; its silver
shrines and terra-cotta idols. Yet I was
surprised and moved more by that curious old
Moorish Pantheon I stumbled into yesterday,
in that little dark street, where piles of charcoal
were heaped up at the doors, and the
stalls were hung with smoked, gilded looking
fish with their mouths open, as if they had
died screaming, or trying to depart with a
song; where vendors sat with arms sullenly
crossed, as calmly indifferent to purchasers, as
an Irish orange-seller at a London fruit-stall,
knitting over her greasy book of Catholic
prayers.

"Perhaps they are right," I said, "for
what is the struggle of life, but scrambling up
a greasy pole for a leg of mutton and
trimmings: Call it a coronet? call it a place
you perhaps never get, death always pulls you
down, just as you have your greedy hand upon
the prize."

It was a circular church, spanned by a low
dome, as low as that of the Pantheon; so that
its huge metal bowl was palpable to us in all
its grandeur and immensity. I came into it
suddenly from the little, narrow, knobbly
street, where bullocks lounged heavily
along, where the herdsmen in sheepskin
jackets followed, with their lances over their
shoulders; and where, in the windows,
bloodthirsty dagger-knives, large as sickle-blades,
were gleaming for sale. The sluggish pounding
of some tin kettle of a bell over the blue
porcelain-tiled roof of the dome, drove me in
under the dirty green-yellow curtain, rousing
in me a sudden sense of that religious instinct
that cries for food within our blind hearts,
and will not be said nay to. I followed in
some rough men who took off their hats gravely
as a little beggar-girl, lifted up the end of
the fringed curtain with all the dexterity of
long habit, a small picker-up of crumbs in
the courts of the Temple.

I expected Corinthian pillars, row on row,
gold garnished roof, flowers, altars stuck
with candles, and side chapels, gay as a
beauty's toilette. I expected the dreadful
churrigueresque, as the Spanish blustering
renaissance is called. I found a quiet, solitary
church, with a dying pansy-purple, fading
out about the small upper sun-excluding
windows; the last tinges of daylight lingering
like yellow leaves blown up against the wall,
at the points furthest removed from the three
pendant brazen lamps that swung with a
visible halo round them. Above the central
altar and two side chapels the light was not
sufficient to pick out and hold up to garish
ridicule the wax feet, chains, and knives,
stuck as votive offerings round the shrines,
Hid, in generous obscurity, the painted
wooden saints and the little ballet-dancing
virgins all dirty muslin, tinsel crowns, and
spangled jewellery; so that the soft yellow
lamplight melting into an outer edge of
luminous darkness, wrapped all the myrrh-
scented building in an atmosphere of all-
pervading beauty, love, and charity. The
priests had not yet come, for it wanted ten
minutes or so to service; but a white-caped
acolyte, young and innocent as one of Murillo's
cherubims grown up, was tripping about with
a religious fervour almost mirthful and
sunshiny, lighting the altar-candles. How quick
the flame ran in growing stars from wick to
wick! Still the chiming cow-bell jogs and
waggles over head, every cracked tinkle
preceded by a rusty drawl and drag, as if some
mechanical help of the old gouty bell-ringer
were in pain and travail. No one enters but
the little beggar child, kneeling in a trance of
prayer. One grey-headed patched old vine-
dresser who has been down from the
mountains with jars full of green grape bunches
for England, flings himself on his knees at
the humble Publican's distance from the
altar, whose splendour he does not think
himself fit to approach. He bows his old
grey bullet head. How cataleptic that atttude,
except when the Beckett-like priest
sails in in his white and cloth of gold trapped
with all the millinery of his church; he then
crosses himself rapidly five times, forehead
and chest, in memory of the five wounds
of Christ. In the darkness of that second
chapel there is an old Duenna, kneeling
carelessly as if going through some ceremony
at an opera rehearsal. That old man, I
warrant him, with his hemp sandals, hussar