between the beds. At one end of the room was a long table with the
breeding cages of the canaries, whose loves and nurseries the sisters of
the tower guard so tenderly.

“See this little one;” Maria put her face close to the cage and made a
little singing sound. “He’s getting strong now; he was weakly at first,
and I thought we should lose him. It would be a pity; his father is our
best singer.” The canaries, all in a flutter at being waked up,
chattered and scolded at her.

“Maria will take them up to see the view,” said Encarnacion; “if they
will excuse me, I will go down in case some one else should call.” I am
afraid Encarnacion knew we liked Maria best.

Down in the town of Granada the bells were ringing like mad, the
nightingales were singing in the Duke of Wellington’s elms, that shade
the long, steep road leading from the town to the red city of the
Alhambra, perched high above it. At the foot of the tower was a carpet
of wild flowers, anemones, wild callas, and many other blossoms I did
not know.

“Is the snow always there?” J. asked, pointing to the Sierra Nevada.

“I was born in the tower,” said Maria; “I have lived here all my life,
and I have never seen those mountains without snow. That is the _campana
de la Vela_,” she pointed to a huge bronze bell hanging in the turret.
“You should see the tower on the day after New Year. How many girls come
up to see the view that day! They believe, foolish ones, that she who
rings the bell on the second of January will get a husband before the
year is over.” Maria smiled, with grim close-shut lips. Had she ever
been weak enough to try the charm? For Encarnacion it was unthinkable.

“When Don Alfonzo was here we asked him to ring the bell. Though he
laughed very much, he would not. From what we hear, he will be married
before New Year all the same.”

In the Torre de la Vela they know all that is going on. It was growing
dark; the stars were pricking through the blue; down in the city of
Granada the lights seemed to reflect them.

“Is that the Gypsy quarter?” I asked Maria. I could just make out doors
like the one leading to Aladdin’s cave, in the face of a hillside far
below.

“Yes, that is the Albaicin. You have been there?”

“Not yet; to-morrow we shall go to see some Gypsy dancing.”

Maria shrugged scornful shoulders. “Take care they don’t pick your
pockets. The Gitanos are great thieves; they are taught to steal from
the time they are babies. You may like what you will see. When there are
no ladies,” she held up her hands in horror, “their dances are not to be
imagined or described. Do not let him go by himself.” She looked at
Patsy, leaning over the parapet absorbed in the view. “They are
deceitful hussies! The dances they dance when men go alone are very
different from what you will see!”

“That would be a hot walk without the shade of those trees,” said Patsy.
“Pleasant that we should remember the Iron Duke in Spain most of all for
his elms. Who loves his fellow men, plants trees. The English _are_
civilized, confound ’em! The longer you’re in Europe, the more you have
to think of England as the Great Friend.”

There was no excuse to linger longer. The sisters had invited us to sup,
and we had declined.

“Go you with God,” said Encarnacion, she came with us to the door.
“To-night when you hear the _campana_ de la Vela, think of Maria and me
in the tower.”

“In the tower,” echoed Maria over her shoulder.

The next day we drove to the Albaicin, by the road of the Sacred
Mountain. The base of the mountain is honeycombed with gypsy cave
dwellings. The caves are built, or rather excavated,

[Illustration: GIPSIES OF GRANADA.]

at four different levels, and entered from rough terraces. The gypsy
settlement seemed a sort of primitive community, like those from which
Tangiers and Naples must have developed into the terraced cities they
are to-day. Higher up the mountains are the sacred caves where hermits
once lived. On the summit is a large church and a religious house.

“That old gentleman Don Jaime gave me the letter to,” said Patsy, “told
me that the priests who live up there are no end of swells. They can’t
‘get in’ on anything but merit, not even royal patronage. They must show
that they have the goods; must pass a stiff examination. Each one has
his separate establishment, with his own house and garden and servants,
and draws a pension of from three to five thousand pesetas a year. Most
of them are great ‘orators’; they are sent for from all over Spain to
preach, and jolly well paid for it. They always get twenty-five dollars
a sermon, and have been known to get forty! Spain’s the place for
priests; when I take orders I shall come here to live!”

The gypsy King met us at the entrance of his cave; a swart hulk of a
man, with the voice of a bull and bold piercing eyes. Behind him stood
his son, looking just as the King must have looked at twenty. The boy
had a mop of coarse black hair--the King’s was iron gray--low forehead,
strong white teeth, that curious veiled eye that later in life grows
fierce and bright; body, hands, feet, exquisitely turned, color a rich
olive, the look of race that is better than beauty, and the glow of
youth that is best of all. It was small wonder the two ragged girls
plaiting straw in the dust of the hot yellow road looked at him with
longing eyes.

The door of the cave, fitted flat against the hillside, seemed to lead
into the bowels of the earth. The cave, literally scooped out of the
mountain, was divided into four decent whitewashed rooms, comfortable
and clean enough. We went directly from the road into the largest; it
was of fair size, with rough beams running across the ceiling and with a
tiled floor. We were expected; great preparations had been made for our
visit. A row of rush-bottomed chairs stood against the wall. Beautifully
polished copper saucepans of many sizes were placed on a shelf, with
some wild peonies stuck in a beer bottle. I somehow fancied that the
saucepans would be for sale if we took a fancy to them. A small inner
room, perfectly dark, led from the living room; it had a bed with a
white crocheted quilt. On the left of the entrance was a cave room that
served as a kitchen; on the right, a sort of property room,--where half
a dozen women and girls with powdered faces and fresh flowers in their
hair were waiting. The eldest, a fierce old woman with a beak like a
parrot’s, dusted a chair for me.

“This is my house,” she said. Pointing to the King, “He is my son, these
are all my family.” She seemed surprised at my asking if there was any
other cave as good as hers.

“No,” she said, “this is the best; cool in summer, warm in winter, and
clean, as you can see.”

The musicians, the King’s son and another youth with oiled hair and
clean new jackets, took their places, twanged their guitars and the
_fiesta flamanca_ began. First a dance by two women, while the others
sat by, clapping their hands, tapping with their feet, keeping time to
the music.

“More power!” cried the King.

“_Dalé, dalé_,” droned the chorus. The guitars twanged louder, the
hand-clapping redoubled. Little by little the dancers woke up. The
youngest woman was sixty, the oldest girl ten. This was a little
disappointing to Patsy, though they all did their best and gave us good
measure. The children were evidently students being carefully trained;
the old women were all good artists, and intent on preserving and
handing down the traditions of their art,--but the thing was somehow
curiously academic! The old mother took a tambourine from the wall and
shook out the music from it in fine style. “Tire yourselves!” she
cried. After the second dance, she handed a tray with glasses of wine.
Each succeeding dance was better than the last. The best of all was the
one the old woman gave us at the end. Only once was there an approach to
what Maria had hinted at. A woman with a bad face gave us a Jaleo, a
gross, wriggling dance with unpleasant contortions of the body,
wonderful as an exhibition of skill and strength, but not quite decent,
and lacking the grace, the beauty, and the dignity of the old woman’s
performance.

“Haven’t we had enough?” said Patsy, at the end of half an hour. “You
saw those men tip the wink to our coachman as we passed? The whole
village is on its good behavior. We are not to be shocked, annoyed, or
begged from; it’s all put down in the bill we must pay the ruffian King
for protecting us from his tribe, preventing us from seeing the real
thing and giving us this fake show.”

Patsy was all wrong--because he was disappointed in the age of the
performers! You can see a young and handsome Spanish dancing girl in any
music hall in Madrid. The gypsy cave in the mountainside, where the
dancers of the past and the dancers of the future meet, was worth a trip
to Granada!

[Illustration: LA PUERTA DEL VINO, GRANADA.]

[Illustration: A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA.]

Of course we spent most of our time in Granada at the Alhambra. Some
things must be experienced to be understood. Falling in love is one,
Niagara Falls another, going down a toboggan slide a third, the Alhambra
a fourth. The old simile of the oyster came to mind as freshly as if we
had invented it,--just as every pair of young lovers imagine they have
invented love! The heavy walls are the outside of the oyster; the fairy
courts and halls painted with the tints of rainbow, dawn, sea, and
moonlight are the inside of the shell. The pearl? In the room of the Two
Sisters the winter apartment of the sultana, I had a vision of Irving’s
Linderaxa. I could not remember how he described his pearl of the harem,
but the face I saw or dreamed of as I sat in that fairy palace was the
fairest woman’s face I ever saw. Her skin was like warm ivory, her hair
an aureole of flame, her eyes, gray stars, her smile, the smile of the
imperishable child.

I asked Patsy if he was disappointed in the Alhambra.

“Yes,” he said, “disappointed the right way. After the Acropolis, it is
the best thing I ever saw. The lovely color, the movement of it all!
Will you tell me how any people could invent a written language as
decorative as this?” We were in one of the great halls looking at the
Cuffik inscriptions that form one of the most fascinating and
characteristic of the wall ornamentations.

“It is all based on Persian art, but it is even more joyous, don’t you
think? You know the Koran discourages, if it does not forbid, the
representation of any living creature in art. That is like the ‘Thou
shalt make no graven image.’ Man and beast are practically ruled out of
Arab art. Do you miss them? I don’t. After the gross use of men and
animals,--remember the great bearded bullmen of the Assyrians, and the
hawk and cat headed gods of Egypt,--this endless variation of leaf and
flower and geometric design is refreshing. Why it is like a vegetarian
diet to a sailor man who has had scurvy from living on salt beef.”

The guardian, who had long tracked us, here buttonholed J., and poured
out a flood of familiar information. We listened mechanically, as he
talked, until he said something we had not heard twenty times before.

“Last week two Moors from the Algeciras Conference were here. I myself
took them about. They showed no enthusiasm. In this room the older one
said to me, ‘These are sentences from the Koran,’ as if I did not know
that before! In spite of all their pretended indifference, I knew very
well what those Moors were feeling. It is a very deceitful race; they
always hide their emotions.” The guardian spoke as scornfully of the
Moors as Maria had spoken of the gypsies.

“Do you notice how they all dislike what they call deceit? The Spaniard
is a truthful person, and honest. I don’t know why it is surprising, but
after some of the countries we have traveled in, it comes like a shock!”
said Patsy.

A long straight path of gold sand between two lines of tall, black
cypresses leads to the old Moorish garden of the Generalife, near the
Alhambra. Every other tree is clipped square at the top, the alternate
one towering to a pointed spire. There is always a sound of gliding
waters; in the early morning and evening, when the birds’ matins and
lauds are sung, you can hear the nightingales and the merles. In the
patio of the cypresses, under the shade of immemorial trees, is a great
sheet of still green water like a vast chrysophrase, where you can study
the cloud shadows, or your own reflection--if you are handsome--like
Narcissus, or watch the greedy gudgeon and gold fish devour the bread
you throw them. We passed through a long, flower-bordered path with a
thicket of laurel, aloes and pomegranate for a background. A hundred
tiny jets of water, like white aigrettes, waved among the green, and
lost themselves in the shrubbery. We climbed the long Stairway of the
Cascades, cheered by the babble of the little streams of water that run
down the tops of the balustrade on either side. In the mirador at the
top we rested, and looked down on the wonderful garden with its
terraces, cedars, clipped myrtle hedges, thousand and one fountains.

“The Bankshires are only beginning here; in Seville the rose madness was
at its height,” said Patsy. “We have travelled with the rose; we
couldn’t have managed better if we had tried.”

From the mirador you see the Sierras with the eternal snow fields
glistening on their summits. “The Moors certainly understood the use of
water,” said J. “I have never seen anything quite so good as this garden
even in Italy.”

There was music in the air, the rushing sound of water from those
melting snows cunningly led down the mountainside and set here to dance
and sing, to cool the heat and beguile the leisure hours of long, hot,
summer days. Patsy watched with fascinated eyes a joyous _saldadore_ of
water leaping and singing under the shade of an oak.

“Water is to these people of the south what fire is to us northerners,”
he said. “They are the two living elements, and they both dance. Dancing
is the natural expression of joy in life; it is copied from dancing
spray and dancing flame. David was quite right to dance before the ark.
I had a

[Illustration: RETABLO, CARVED IN HIGH AND LOW RELIEF. _Roldan_]

Shaker nurse who danced with me when I cried; I suppose that is why I’m
so fond of it.”

Granada cathedral is so hemmed in with trumpery little buildings that it
is impossible to get an impression of it as a whole. The mushroom growth
will have to go. Each succeeding tourist wave sweeping over Europe, as
the Goths and Vandals swept before them, sweeps away some such trash,
and uncovers hidden gems of architecture. The interior of the cathedral,
though over ornate, has some splendid architectural effects, and is rich
in every sort of treasure ecclesiastical. I remember a curious white
marble statue of the Virgin with a black marble cloak, and a very
charming painted wood group of St. Anne, St. Joachim and Mary, a good
example of one of the arts you must come to Spain to see. Painted wood
statuary, wrought iron work, ecclesiastical embroidery and--dancing have
all been carried farther in Spain than anywhere else in Europe.
Montañes, Roldan, and Alonzo Cano, succeeded in making their painted
wood statues and bas-reliefs as dignified as if they had worked in
bronze or marble. Just as Luca della Robbia did with terra cotta. There
is a polychrome carved retablo of the Entombment in Seville, by Roldan,
that is a true masterpiece of sculpture. The outer figures are modelled
in such high relief they seem almost free; those in the middle distance
are in ordinary high relief, the more distant in low, almost flat
relief; the background is a painted wood panel. This does not sound
encouraging, but the material a masterpiece is made of is of little
consequence; it may be wood, marble, iron, gold or woven wool,--if a
master uses it, a masterpiece is produced.

As I was sketching the wonderful wrought iron screen that shuts off the
tombs from the main part of the chapel royal, I heard two women’s
voices: “You have made a mistake, I think. The tombs of Ferdinand and
Isabel are on the right,” said an alert, gray-haired woman.

“Thank you; I know,” said a clear young voice. The last speaker, caught
red handed in the very act of laying flowers on a tomb, was annoyed. She
saw that I, too, looked with disfavor on the alert gray-haired lady with
the guidebook, and by mutual consent we made acquaintance beside the
tomb of Juana la Loca, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, and her
husband, Philippe le Bel.

“Poor things!” said the girl who had laid the flowers between the two
marble figures lying side by side.

“Poor things! Tell me their story if you remember it.”

“They were married when Juana was seventeen, and Philippe eighteen. She
was very pretty, but he was the handsomest man in Europe. They only had
each other ten years; even then they were not allowed much peace! At
first they lived at his court in Brussels where they were very happy;
life was not quite so strict and straight laced as at the Spanish Court.
Isabel was a great queen, but I don’t think she could have been a nice
mother. She sent a priest to be Juana’s confessor, a grim Spanish bigot.
Phillippe laughed at him so much that Juana refused to confess to him.
That was the beginning of all their troubles! The priest came back to
Spain and told tales, set her mother against Juana. When she came home,
to be with her mother when her child was born, Isabel tried to prevent
her returning to her husband,--locked her up. Did you ever hear of such
a thing?”

She spoke as if it was happening now; her face was flushed; she clinched
and unclinched her hand.

“But they couldn’t keep Juana; she was like a raging lioness; they had
to let her go back to her husband. Then Isabel spread the report that
Juana was mad,--and made arrangements in her will to prevent her ever
reigning. Juana wouldn’t have cared about that; all she wanted was to be
let alone, to have a little peace and happiness in her life. After
Isabel’s death, those two poor things made their great mistake,--they
came back to Spain. Somebody who was jealous of their happiness poisoned
Philippe. Nobody knows whether Juana’s father Ferdinand was responsible
for the murder or the Inquisition. I think it was the Inquisition; those
cruel inquisitors did not want anybody to be happy, and Philippe was too
liberal, too open-minded to suit that terrible Cardinal Jimenez. Juana
and Philippe were at Burgos at the time. When it was all over, the
friends who were with her at the deathbed told Juana that her husband
was dead.

“No,” she said, “not dead, asleep!” You see, then, she really did go
mad. They had Philippe embalmed and put in a leaden coffin; from that
day Juana was never separated from his body. Wherever she went she took
it with her; for twenty years she travelled all over the country with
it. I saw her coach, the first that ever came to Spain, in Madrid. In
those days, when royalties travelled, they stopped at convents or
monasteries, if there was no royal residence near. Poor Juana was so
jealous she would never go into a convent, for fear the nuns might look
at her beloved! Philippe dead had his pages and his suite just as if he
had been alive. Finally, Juana was shut up at Tordesillas. There she had
the coffin placed in a chapel leading from her room, where she could
always see it.

[Illustration: MOORISH COLUMNS IN THE ALHAMBRA.]

Here is a photograph I bought of Pradilla’s picture of Juana.”

The picture shows the sad procession on a windswept hillside outside
Burgos just before dawn. The coffin stands on an iron bier, with two wax
candles at the head and foot. A priest reads the service from his book.
Juana’s ladies stand or sit exhausted on the ground. A group of pages
and gentlemen in furred dresses stand near a fire kindled in the open.
Juana, in a long black dress, stands beside the coffin looking down.
“Dead? No, asleep!” she seems to say.

“For forty-seven years Juana watched beside the body of her husband. He
died at twenty-eight; she lived to seventy-four. Their son, Charles V,
gave Juana as fine a tomb as Isabel’s. I think she deserved it. A great
lover is as rare as a great queen. Come with me and see the vault. That
old battered coffin is Philippe’s, the very one Juana carried about with
her. I touched it the other day. It made it all seem so real!”

We were standing by the royal vault, looking down through a grating at
the coffins, when a fair young man with blue eyes strolled through the
chapel and joined us.

“Haven’t you been here long enough, Joan?” he said. “Let’s get out of
this stuffy old church.”

“All ready, Philip; I was only waiting for you.” She looked at him with
adoring eyes, smiled kindly at me, and went off leaning on his arm. They
were as pretty a young couple as you could see, and their names were
Philip and Joan! It could hardly have been by chance that they were
here. I fancied that the bride had contrived to include a pilgrimage to
the tomb of the true lover, Joan the Mad, in their wedding journey.

    _Amor es como el vino_
    _guárdate á tiempo_
    _y te sabrá más dulce_
    _cuanto mas viejo._

    Love is like wine;
    Guarded with time
    It shall taste to thee sweetest
    When it is oldest.

IX

TANGIERS

We sailed from Algeciras for what Don Jaime called our “little crusade
to Morocco.” The Don could not go with us; he was called to Madrid, he
said, on important business. Patsy, who went down to Algeciras a day or
two before us, had something to tell about the Conference then in
session. The Moroccan delegates had arrived at night, bringing the
ladies of their harems with them. They had landed between two and three
in the morning, so the few curious persons waiting on the dock only
caught an unsatisfactory glimpse of muffled figures passing from the
vessel to the waiting carriages. Private houses had been prepared for
the Moorish delegates; most of the Europeans, and Mr. Henry White, the
American delegate, stayed at the Hotel Maria Cristina.

At the opening meeting of the Conference on the sixteenth of January,
1906, the president, the Duc d’Almodovar, declared that the reforms to
be introduced into Morocco must be based on the triple principle of the
sovereignty of the Sultan the integrity of his states, and the open
door. The poor Moroccan delegates, who did not want any reforms at all
introduced into their country, were only allowed to read their little
speech at the second session, and as it was in Arabic, nobody understood
much of it.

We had a perfect day for our trip across the Straits of Gibraltar from
Europe to Africa. It took two hours and a half, and seemed much shorter
than crossing the English channel. At one point we could see at the same
time the white houses of Tangiers, and the gray Moorish fortifications
of Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe. The currents are very
strong between the two coasts. A French steamer lay wrecked upon the
rocks close to Tarifa Point light. The sea was like a silver shield. On
the Spanish coast there were long stretches of tawny sands among the
gray and purple rocks, with here and there an ancient Saracen
watch-tower.

“Trafalgar Bay lies in that direction,” said Patsy, pointing to the
northwest. “Nelson must have looked at these yellow cliffs, as he lay
dying on the deck of the Victory, thinking, perhaps, of the white cliffs
of England.”

The winds that blew over Trafalgar Bay caught the great Admiral’s last
command, “Anchor,

[Illustration: TANGIERS.]

Hardy, anchor,” and his last request whispered to his trusty Captain,
“Kiss me, Hardy!” If you ever sail that way, listen to the wind
whistling in the shrouds. If you have ears to hear such things, you may
catch the echo of that whisper.

The coast of Africa, as we approached it, was not more arid than the
opposite shore.

We anchored in the bay far out from Tangiers, a white town set like a
pearl on the edge of an emerald crescent. Near the right point of the
crescent, Tangiers climbs up the hill from the yellow sea sands to the
green heights of the foreign embassies and villas; at the extreme point
stands the lighthouse. America cleared the Mediterranean of Barbary
pirates; and the great European powers built the lighthouse, as they
have built the post-offices, the hospital, and every other modern thing
in Morocco. While waiting for the health officers, we watched the fish
darting through the clear, beryl-green water. Presently a lighter with a
load of bulls closely wedged together drew up alongside the steamer. A
rope was passed round the horns of two of the bulls, and they were
hoisted on board in pairs, in what seemed a cruel manner. The whole
weight came on their horns, their necks were stretched out, their poor,
frightened eyes, blank with terror haunt me still. They made no noise;
most of them hung limp; a few struggled and only succeeded in kicking
each other.

We and our luggage were rowed ashore in a small boat. The sea was alive
with half naked bronze men in sacking bournouses, who waded back and
forth, carrying enormous loads of terra cotta tiles from a lighter to
the land. On the pier a splendid person in a long blue garbardine, white
turban, and yellow slippers, met us with a card and a bouquet of
flowers.

“My name is Ali,” he said; “I am your friend.” He laid his hand to his
lips, then to his forehead with the grave and lovely salutation of the
East.

Ali led us before three magnificent, white-robed Moors, sitting
cross-legged on the floor of the custom-house, smoking long chibouks.
These officials paid no attention to us; indeed, they seemed unconscious
of our presence. The two younger men went on with their conversation;
the elder, kingly as Saul, looked silently across the sea towards that
lost paradise of his race, Andalusia. Our luggage was laid down at their
feet; they did not even glance at it. After a few minutes, the youngest
Moor took his pipe from his mouth, and waved his hand slightly in our
direction.

“All right,” said Ali, “good custom-house, yes?”

The bearers took up our portmanteaus, and we passed into the narrow
crowded street where no vehicle can go, and where Ali had hard work to
protect me from the surging crowd of heavily laden porters and donkeys.
It was market day. Ali piloted us through a maze of narrow, twisting
lanes, and markets thronged with strange figures: Moors in white
bournouses, Jews in black caftans, negro slaves with gashed faces, wild
looking hill men with blue eyes, who looked at us more fiercely than all
the rest. The buyers and sellers outshrieked each other. The long sharp
cry of the water-carriers, the braying of donkeys, the yelling of man,
woman and child, mingled with the hammering of the tin and coppersmiths
in the bazaars.

In the vegetable market we met a tall old Sheik with a long beard,
dressed in a lovely pea-green _jellabiyah_, with turban to match, and
salmon colored undergarments. Ali salaamed to him.

“Health be with you!”

“And with you be peace!” The Sheik’s voice was like distant thunder. He
carried a large basket. The seller of vegetables received him
respectfully, if less cordially than Ali. The Sheik cast a critical eye
over the vegetables, then laid his hand on a bunch of young carrots, a
string of fresh onions, some ruby radishes and some long green beans.
Whatever he touched, the dealer put into his basket, saying, “Take it,”
each time more faintly.

“God increase thy goods!” said the Sheik, when he had considerably
diminished them by half filling his own basket.

“And thy goods, also,” answered the dealer cheerfully, as the old man
pottered off to the butcher’s, next door.

“He is holy man,” said Ali; “they all give to him.”

The butcher’s gifts--a skinned sheep’s head, with awful staring eyes,
and other gruesome things, were too horrid to look at. We waited till
the Sheik passed on to the bread sellers, a group of white shrouded
women sitting against a wall. They were as carefully veiled as if they
had been young and lovely ladies. Each had a cushion before her with
flat loaves of bread. When the middle one gave the Sheik a loaf, there
was the rattle of bangles, and a glimpse of a hand that might have
belonged to the Cumaean sibyl.

Outside the market, in the midst of the mad hurly-burly, there appeared
an incarnation of that Oriental calm we had begun to believe the Moors
had left behind them in Cordova. Down the middle of an evil-smelling
lane, a man on horseback rode slowly towards us. The squalling crowd
made way for him, flattening itself against the wall.

“Welcome!” said Ali, as the stranger passed in the odor of sandalwood.

“Twice welcome,” answered the horseman. He was fairer than many
Spaniards; his brown beard and moustache were beautifully combed and
curled, he had a high aquiline nose, eyes like dark jewels, thin
pencilled eyebrows. He was dressed all in white; his _sulham_ of finest
wool had a silk braid round the edge, and tassel hanging from the hood
drawn over his head. He turned his horse to avoid us. Except for that
slight motion of laying the reins against the animal’s neck--the action
showed a slim brown hand with an ancient turquoise ring--he gave no sign
of having seen us. It is a sign of Arab as of British breeding, not to
look too much at strangers.

“That was an Arab gentleman,” said J.

“Now I know just how Abd-er Rahman looked!” murmured Patsy.

The horse was a spirited chestnut, with a skin so thin the veins showed
under it, and delicate, proud feet that he planted scornfully in the
unspeakable filth of the lane. Later, in Blacksmiths Square, where we
lingered to watch two men shoe an old white mare--one held her foot, the
other put on the shoe--a servant led the chestnut up to the smith. The
man stopped work, patted the chestnut and kissed it, while his helper
fed it with little cakes. Though there were a dozen horses and mules
waiting their turn to be shod, the chestnut took precedence over all.

Ali explained this favoritism. “That horse, he have been to Mecca,” he
said. “That make him very holy.”

For all his holiness the homely smell of the chestnut’s scorched hoof
when the hot shoe touched it was in no wise different from the old white
mare’s!

Seeing the horse fitted with a set of new shoes reminded J. and Patsy
that while in Morocco they must each buy a pair of real Morocco
slippers. Ali had a friend who was a slipper seller, so we hunted him up
in the quiet, back street where he lived. We found him in a tiny bazaar
like a big box, hung with slippers of every size and color. The others
were so long choosing their shoes, the street was so deserted, that I
ventured to walk on alone. From an open doorway came the drone of
childish voices reciting a lesson; an Arab school was in session. Twenty
very little boys sat upon the floor, rocking slowly back and forth,
reciting verses from the Koran in a sort of singsong chant. The
schoolroom was a dark, dank hole, its only light coming from the door.
Dazzled by the blinding light of the street, I did not at first see the
schoolmaster, a young man of eighteen. He sat near the door, writing
out sentences from the Koran with a reed pen, in a large book like a
ledger. He had just reached the bottom of the page, had dipped his reed
in a fascinating bronze inkstand worn in his sash, and I was silently
admiring his beautiful Arabic handwriting, when he looked up and saw me.
A tiny boy, who could not have been more than three, just then smiled at
me. He was such a bonny child, so like one of the children at home, that
I kissed my hand to him.

“Christian dog!” The master’s rattan whizzed through the air, and came
down whack, whack, on each side of the boy’s head. Then all the little
children scowled and bit their thumbs at me. The master tore the neatly
written page from the book, crumpled it up, threw it at me, and
retreated across the room, the book under his arm, cursing me as I
believe I was never cursed before.

At that moment Ali came running up, and after a few angry words with the
schoolmaster, hurried me away.

“They no like you,” he said. “I am your friend; I take care of you.”

The page had been torn from the book because the shadow of a Christian
had fallen upon it! After that, Ali became as my shadow. When I wanted
to stop and admire the tower of the great Mosque,--it has a poor,
far-away likeness to the Giralda--he would not let me stay, telling me
that it was not safe for Christians to linger near the mosque or the
tombs of saints.

The Great Socco, the big market-place outside the city gate, is the most
Oriental thing you can see without going to India. The bazaars of
Constantinople, the Muski of Cairo, even the streets of Jaffa, are
European compared to it. The Socco lies on a bare hillside; it is shut
in with walls, and entered through a handsome Moorish gate. A restless
stream of camels, asses, beggars, traders, fruit-sellers, veiled women,
jugglers and snake charmers pulses ceaselessly back and forth. A caravan
from Fez was starting that day, another had just arrived. The camels
snarled and grunted as the drivers unloaded their bales of merchandise
and dates. Near the gate, in a corner of comparative peace, an audience
had collected about the one-eyed story teller. He beat his drum as we
came up. Ali gave him a piece of silver, and we were allowed to stand on
the edge of the crowd and listen to the tale of the Fisherman and the
Genie told in Arabic with dramatic gestures, and listened to with
breathless interest.

There was an encampment at one end of the Socco, extending outside the
gate along the road to Vez. The tents were small and poor, the people
who lived in them wild, and, at the same time, wan

[Illustration: STREET IN TANGIERS.]

looking,--the most wretched of all the wretched people I have ever seen.
They belong to a tribe of Berbers from the country, driven by famine
into Tangiers. The blue eyes of those half-naked, half-starved hillmen
shone with a fierce light; the black-eyed Moors looked gentle beside
them. Blue eyes mean white blood! The wild hillmen have not forgotten
where it comes from. They remember that long and long ago, in Roman
days, a tribe of Vandals and Alans--some say eighty thousand
people--crossed the straits to Morocco and never came back, though three
hundred years later some of their descendants came over to Spain with
Tarik, our old friend of Tarik’s Hill, and conquered Christian Spain for
the Crescent.[2]

Outside the Socco, on the road leading up to the villas, we came upon a
white umbrella with an artist we knew by sight sketching under it,
guarded by a soldier. His was the first Christian face we had seen since
we left the steamer; it seemed an age, it was but a few hours ago. We
greeted each other as if we had been old friends! He knew Tangiers well,
had been here three months sketching, therefore he had a great deal to
tell us about Morocco and the Moors. I noticed during all our stay that
the people who had lived longest in Morocco were the least positive in
what they said about the Moors! My first question to the artist was
about the Berber tribe.

“During the Algeciras Conference,” he said, “the Sultan feeds them with
bread every day, so that it may not be said that he cannot take care of
his own. They tell me here that the day the Conference adjourns, there
will be no more bread given away in Tangiers.”

Before lunch time J. and Patsy adopted, or were adopted, by a Hebrew
Jew. Israel was his name; Christian, compared to the fierce Moslem
horde, was his nature. He was a neat young man, educated at the school
of the Israelite Alliance in Tangiers, pleasant and well mannered, his
chief defect being that he wore silly European clothes, when he might
have worn lovely Oriental robes. He quickly confided to us that he was
engaged to be married, and that his Rachel was suffering from acute
dyspepsia. He didn’t _say_ dyspepsia, but he illustrated it with
unmistakable sounds and gestures.

“Let her take one of these after every meal.” Patsy handed Israel a
bottle of soda mint tablets. Israel bent himself double with bowing.
Meanwhile he and Ali gabbled together; the word _hakem_ (physician) was
repeated several times. The soda mints worked well; they suited Rachel,
and Patsy’s reputation as a physician was made. That was the beginning
of all his glory, and our discomfort.

At luncheon there was quail for him, larks for us. When we rode out, he
had the best mount. The pillows of his bed were soft as down, ours hard
as brickbats. That night Ali consulted him about his daughter, who
seemed to be suffering from bronchitis. A box of Brown’s bronchial
troches was unearthed from my medicine chest and given to Ali. Though
the troches were mine, the credit was Patsy’s!

I saw three prisons in Tangiers: the prison of the Moors, the prison of
the Jews, and the prison of a Prominent Citizen’s wives. In the first
two, hideous and squalid past belief, criminals are kept; in the third,
the mothers of the prominent citizens of to-morrow, in whose hands lie
the future of Morocco. This prison, called a harem, was the most
dreadful of all, though it was clean, handsome, had a large patio,
marble columns, and whatever else passes in Morocco for luxury. I was
received by the Prominent Citizen’s four wives. The favorite, an
enormously fat young woman, sleek and sleepy as a cat, had painted eyes
and finger nails reddened with henna. After the first greeting, the
other women paid little attention to me; the favorite, who was younger,
had some questions to ask.

“Are you married? How many children have you? I have a son.
She”--looking at a woman who sat near, a sour-faced creature of Chinese
type--“has only daughters. This morning we saw you pass in the street. I
know that everything is different in your country. You travel, we stay
at home; you go out unveiled, we may not show our faces to any strange
man. There were two men with you this morning; were they your two
husbands?”

I tried to explain Patsy. It seemed stranger to her that he was only our
friend travelling with us, than if he had been an extra husband.

A servant brought in a copper machine like a Russian samovar, and the
Chinese looking wife made tea for us with fresh green tea leaves and
mint. It was very sweet, and not just what I am used to in the way of
tea, but I managed to drink one small tumblerful; the ladies of the
harem drank glass after glass. I had brought a present of some goodies,
and when these had been distributed the conversation became more
animated. The women all examined my dress, hat, gloves and jewels, with
greatest interest. The favorite cried out at the close fitting French
waist, held her hands to her own fat sides, and shook her head at the
very thought of confining those Atlas mountains of flesh with stiff
whalebone. I told her that I thought her dress much more comfortable,
and far prettier than mine; this pleased her more than anything I said.

From the corridor round the patio heavy green doors led to the women’s
sleeping rooms. They had no windows; no light or air could ever
penetrate those dreadful places, quite empty save for the
beds,--mattresses laid on the floor covered with gay quilts,--and
several large clocks hanging on the walls. In the part of the harem I
saw there was literally nothing except divans, beds, and little stands
for trays,--things to sit on, to sleep in, to eat from. There must have
been rooms where the cooking and housework goes on, but I did not see
them. The rooms were empty, the faces of the women were empty. It seemed
the height of irony that where time is of so little value there should
be so many timepieces. The English lady who arranged the visit for me
goes often to this and other harems.

“The women’s lives are so dull, any visitor is welcome,” she said. “One
rule I have had to make. I must choose the subject we talk
about,--otherwise, they would talk of unspeakable things. They are so
coarse and dull. Poor things!”

The poorer women seem better off than the well-to-do, because they have
more occupation. They cook, wash, and make the clothes for themselves
and their children. They must be very strong, for I saw women carrying
the most enormous loads of faggots. Divorce is not uncommon among them;
the divorced woman is always given back her dowry. A bride is brought to
her husband’s house heavily veiled. It is for her to lift the veil; if
she refuses, the marriage does not go on. I heard of a girl who for
three days kept her veil down, and was then sent back to her parent’s
house.

It was pleasant after a day spent in the muck and confusion of Tangiers,
to mount Zuleika, the big gray donkey, and ride up to the European
quarter for the sunset. My saddle was like a little chair set sideways
on the mule, with a swinging board to support my feet. Ali walked by my
side, Abdul, the mule driver, just behind.

“Arrree!” Abdul cried, and twisted Zuleika’s tail till the poor creature
screamed.

“Stop!” said Ali. “By thy head, do not that again. Dost thou not know
that Christians would rather see a man beaten than a beast?”

“_Mashallah!_” muttered Abdul. Israel, running beside Patsy, holding his
stirrup, told him in French what the other two said, so they were
usually silent in Israel’s presence.

[Illustration: SPANISH PEASANTS.]

[Illustration: ALI AND ZULEIKA.]

We were on our way to see our friend Mme. Hortense, whom we found
waiting for us on the terrace of her pleasant house. She had kept her
word, and provided a characteristic Moorish entertainment for our
afternoon’s visit,--a snake charmer. His long bag of snakes moved as the
mass of serpents writhed and wriggled. One after another he took the
long pythons from his bag and let them coil and twist about his body.
Last of all he took out a small, vicious looking serpent, and held it to
his mouth. The snake bit his tongue, or appeared to do so, for drops of
the snakecharmer’s blood fell on the white marble pavement.

“You’ve seen enough?” asked Mme. Hortense. She spoke to the snake
charmer with the voice of authority; he gathered up his dreadful linen
bag and departed.

“_Allahu akbar!_” The cry of the Muezzin in the minaret of the mosque
came faintly up to us on the heights.

“Progress?” said Mme. Hortense in answer to my question, as the
ridiculous shambling figure of the snake charmer left the terrace.
“Among the Jews, yes, if you call it progress! When I came here,
thirty-four years ago, your boy Israel’s father and all the rest of
them, wore the fez and the kaftan. Now many of the younger ones wear
straw hats and trousers. They have built themselves comfortable houses
in the worst possible taste. The schools of the Israelite Alliance have
really accomplished a miracle. For the Moors there is no progress,
believe me. In all these years they have not advanced one step. Here in
Tangiers they are on their good behavior, of course; the city is well
policed by the European powers. There is no public slave market here,
you must go to Fez to see that; but as to real advance,--look at that
blind man! His eyes were put out for stealing.”

Down the hot road under the blue cactus hedge a poor pock-marked blind
man cried for alms. Mme. Hortense threw him a coin, a tall, shrouded
woman who was passing, a bare brown child astride on her hip, picked up
the money and gave it him.

“God increase thy goods,” said the blind man. Then as he wandered down
the hill led by his dog, tapping with his cane, “God vouchsafe thee a
good evening. May thy night be happy!”

“He is my cook’s son,” said Mme. Hortense. “All my servants are Moors,
except my Jewish chairmen,--no Moor will carry a Christian. I like the
Moors best. At the time of the last uprising I asked my favorite servant
what he would do if our house were attacked. He said, ‘I would lie down
on the ground before you. That means that you belong to me and that they
must kill me before they touch you.’ I think he would have done it,
too. A good Moor has no vices; he neither drinks nor smokes. The doctors
will tell you what good blood they have; a wound heals with them in half
the time it does with us. Of course I know the servant class best, that
is natural. The better class do not like us,--can you blame them? A man
my husband knew, quite a great personage in his way, got into evil ways
from associating with Christians; in fact, he drank himself to death. He
was a sacred person, of the family of the prophet. The faithful believed
the liquor he drank was turned to milk as it touched his lips, and that
he died without sin; all the same, the wise ones hold us at arm’s
length.”

“Progress!” Mme. Hortense came back to my question. “Last week a man
from the interior came to Tangiers on business. It turned out that it
was important for him to stay here longer than he had planned; but, at
some sacrifice, he persisted in returning to his home on the day
originally fixed. It leaked out through his servants that before leaving
home he had walled up the door of his house. There was a well inside,
and the house was provisioned, as if for a siege, but the women would
grow restless if he delayed his return too long!”

While Mme. Hortense talked, there appeared before us on the terrace, as
if by magic, a lean man with very few clothes and bare, sinewy arms. He
was a juggler, and as we sat there looking down on the flat white
houses, the minarets, the sea beyond, listening to Mme. Hortense’s
stories of life in Tangiers, the juggler pulled from his mouth length
after length of rose-colored ribbon, till he stood in a pink bower
miraculously produced from his interior. A string of large, dangerous
looking needles followed the pink ribbons from his inexhaustible maw.

“_Baraka, baraka!_” Enough, enough, cried Mme. Hortense. The juggler
bowed and was gone as he had come, silently, and as if by magic.

I never knew where Ali slept or when he ate. If I wanted him at the most
impossible time, he was always there! One morning when the voice of the
sea and the song of the birds called me out into the garden for the
sunrise, I thought I had escaped him. Before I reached the end of the
oleander walk he was at my side. Then came the natural, if unreasonable,
demand: “Ali, I am so hungry, get me something to eat.”

“He cook, he hurry up; lady, wait ten minutes.”

“I can’t wait. Get me a glass of milk.”

“Pick your pardon, lady, no can squeeze the buffalo before he had his
breakfast.”

Such strange and interesting creatures lived in that garden: wonderful
long-tailed Japanese cocks with their neat little hens, a lame gazelle,
a white peacock, some blue Australian pigeons, and many other
birds,--and they all had their breakfasts before I had mine. When Ali
finally brought it on a tray and set it on a table under a mammoth
mulberry tree, I was so busy with the bread and honey--orange blossom
honey; when I took the lid off the jar, the perfume was as strong as if
I had held a bunch of orange flowers in my hand--that I did not notice
two gentlemen who were waiting for their breakfast. The buffalo had been
squeezed by this time, for the gentlemen’s servant brought them dates
and milk.

My neighbors were an odd pair: an old man who looked like Jumbo, with
wise small eyes, and gray wrinkled skin like an elephant’s, and a young
man, his son or grandson, who could not have been more than twenty,
though the lower part of his face was covered with a full soft beard.
They were Orientals, I thought, and they would have looked better in
turbans and robes than in European dress. They talked together in a
language whose very sound was unfamiliar. They seemed so remote, so
unconscious of my presence, so much more like figures out of the Arabian
Nights than fellow travellers, that when the older man came up to my
table, spoke to me in perfect English, and asked me if I would like to
see _La Dépêche Morocaine_, the French daily newspaper, I was as much
astonished as if the Sheik of the market-place had spoken to me in my
own tongue. We talked about the weather, the view, the picturesqueness
of Tangiers; when the ice was well broken I found that he wanted to talk
about things at home.

“It is many years since I was in America,” he said. “I rarely meet an
American.” Where _did_ he live? “When I have the good fortune,” he made
me such a bow as Solomon might have made the Queen of Sheba, “I like to
hear how the Great Experiment is working out.” Then followed a searching
examination about affairs at home. His questions showed a complete
ignorance of detail, a good grasp of large issues. He read me as if I
were a book he only had time to skim through. After I had told him what
I could about “the working out” of what he called “the Great
Experiment,” I asked him to tell me something about the Sultan of
Morocco and his brother Muli Hafid. He asked permission to smoke; an
Indian servant brought him a nargileh. When it was drawing nicely, and
the smoke came cool to his mouth after passing through the water in the
crystal jar, he spoke as one who speaks with authority.

“I have known Abdul Aziz and Muli Hafid since they were boys. They are
both weak men; there is little to choose between them. I knew their
father, Muli el Hassan, before them. He was a strong man; he ruled this
people by might, the only way. He was clever, too, pitted the strong
tribes against each other so that they punished one another: thus all
were kept in order, and the balance of power preserved. When he died,
the power remained in the hands of the young Sultan’s mother and the
Grand Vizier: people said he was her lover,--that is as it may be. Then
the Vizier died, the young Sultan took the reins, and everything was
changed. The English got hold of the boy, as they have got hold of so
many a weak young ruler before him. Abdul Aziz became so completely
under English influence that it was said in the bazaars he wore English
clothes under the native dress. He is not only a weak, but a
pleasure-loving person; the two things usually go together. His favorite
amusements are playing polo and going out at night in one of his many
automobiles.” This he said scornfully, and pulled so hard at his pipe
that the water bubbled in the vase.

The young man looked at me and laughed. “Would you rather he took to
ballooning, father? Even a Sultan of Morocco must amuse himself. I knew
a fellow the Sultan took a fancy to. One sign of his favor was that he
accepted my friend’s riding crop and cigarette case and forgot to make
any return present. He told me a good story about Abdul Aziz: One day
he was riding with him, when they met the Sultan’s caravan on its way
from Tangiers to Fez, bringing Abdul Aziz a grand piano. It had come on
to rain, as it sometimes can rain in Morocco! The Sultan insisted on
having the piano unloaded from the camels’ backs and put together. Then
he sat down and strummed on the piano in the middle of the pelting rain,
and the camels and the camel drivers and all the escort stood round, or
sat on their horses, and waited, on the road to Fez.”

“That was like him,” said the old man. “It was when he had become so
unpopular with the people on account of the English influence that he
remitted the taxes for four years as a bid for popularity. Taxes once
lifted from a people like this are not easily put on again. The country
was nearly bankrupt; the Sultan was at the last gasp financially. As
usual he appealed to the English for help. Just then the understanding
between England and France was complete: France was to withdraw from
Egypt and leave England a free hand there; in return for this, England
was to withdraw her influence and support from Morocco. Egypt was worth
more to England than Morocco; the Sultan was sold for forty pieces of
silver.”

“More than he is worth!” said the boy. “France or England, does it
matter which? They are the only two civilized countries in Europe.”

“There is only one country that can civilize,” said the old
man,--“England!”

“It would have gone on well enough, if William the Wilful had not put
his finger into the pie,” said the boy resentfully. His sympathies were
evidently with France.

“We were in Fez when the German Emperor made that famous visit to the
Sultan,” said the old man. “I have never seen the people so moved. They
were in a frenzy of joy; they thought they were saved!”

“That bubble was soon pricked,” said the boy.

“Perhaps, but the Conference sitting over in Algeciras would never have
come off, if it had not been for his visit.”

“What will the Conference accomplish?” I asked.

“It will insure what the diplomats call ‘the integrity of Morocco’ for a
little longer, that is all.”

“How will it end?”

The old man stroked his long gray beard with a truly Oriental movement
of the hand. “Keep your ear to the ground,” he said; “the end of Islam
is not yet. There are more Mohammedans than Christians in the world;
they still make converts. I myself knew an English Lord who became a
musselman.”

“Instead of quarreling among themselves, let the Christians unite!” said
the young man.

“Strife there must be. The young tigers wrestle together, or they would
not be strong to wrestle with the enemy when it is time to go out into
the jungle and kill!”

We might have gone on gossiping till dinner time,--_they_ were in no
hurry,--if Ali had not reminded me of an engagement that could not be
postponed; I had been invited to tea with the Lady of Tangiers.

The house of the Lady of Tangiers is set on the edge of a high cliff.
Far, far below, at the foot of the cliff, the waves break into white
foam flowers, and the seagulls flit and swoop in restless flight over
the emerald sea. House and garden are shut in by a high wall. A man on
horseback was waiting in the road outside the gate, surrounded by a
horde of beggars and cripples. A pair of white shrouded women stood a
little apart, each with a child on her shoulder. The horseman was armed:
a pair of pistols and a knife were stuck in his sash, a rifle was slung
over his shoulder; at his left side hung a long sword. Man and horse
were both of pure Arab breed; there was a certain likeness between them.
Both were thin and wiry, with delicate feet, fierce, flashing eyes,
thin, quivering nostrils. The man sat impassive as a bronze statue, and
gave no sign of having seen our queer cavalcade as we rode up,--Zuleika,
the big gray donkey, with me in my ridiculous chair saddle on her back,
Ali running beside, and Abdul hanging on to her tail. The horse pricked
its dainty ears, whinnied, and turned its head to look at us.

“_Es-salem alekum!_” Health be with you, said Ali, who never allowed
himself to be ignored.

“_U alekum es-salem!_” and with you be peace, answered the Arab on the
horse.

The sound of footsteps inside the garden caused great excitement among
the cripples. The gate was opened and a servant came out leading a
beautiful little boy of four or five. At the sight of the boy, a fair
child, with brown curls and pretty, gracious manners, a howl arose from
the beggars and cripples. They tried to get hold of him, to kiss his
hands or touch his garments. The servant and the man on horseback kept
them back as best they could. The horseman laid about him with the flat
of his sword:

“By the life of the prophet, room there for my lord the prince! _Yalla!_
Go on!”

“I am under thy protection, save me!” cried the oldest beggar; he was
rather cleaner than the rest, and was allowed to touch the little foot
before the horseman caught up the child, set him before him, put spurs
to the horse, and galloped off joyously in a cloud of dust.

“_Al Allah!_” cried the old beggar.

“_Al Allah!_” echoed the cripples, waving their crutches and their
maimed stumps after the pretty child.

Ali gave my card and letter of introduction to the servant. I was
invited to enter the garden. Ali waited for me in the road outside. Near
the house was a little flower bed, with a few homely English flowers;
some one had been at work among the marigolds. Outside the door stood a
large rocking-horse, a drum and a toy trumpet. I had not long to wait in
the reception room, before the Lady of Tangiers appeared. She greeted me
heartily.

“Come in,” she said, and led the way to a large comfortable, English
drawing-room. I suppose I showed some surprise at finding myself in so
thoroughly British an interior, for she said:

“I lead a double life. With the Arabs, I am an Arab; with the Europeans,
I am a European. We will have our tea here first,--you will like my tea
better than my daughter-in-law’s; then I will take you into the Arab
part of the house and introduce you to my son’s wife.”

At the first glance the Lady of Tangiers looked the full-blooded English
woman she is by birth. As I talked with her, I felt something Oriental
in her expression. You cannot live three parts of your life among an
alien race without catching something of the racial look. First, and
last, and all the time, I felt her to be a woman of power. The servant
who brought the tea said something to her in Arabic.

“Were there many children waiting in the crowd outside the gate?” she
asked.

I told her I had seen only two.

“They can wait, or come to-morrow,” she said. “Their mothers have
brought them to be vaccinated. When I first came here I once spoke to my
husband about a child I thought should be vaccinated, as there was so
much small-pox about.”

“How is it done?” he asked.

“I know how it is done,” I said, “and I can do it. That was the
beginning. Now I vaccinate hundreds of children every year. That is the
sort of missionary work I believe in. There is not the slightest use in
sending Christian missionaries to any Mahommedan country, unless they
are willing to work without direct religious teaching. Civilize first!
Teach the women and the girls to cook and sew, something about the laws
of health, and the care of children.”

The Lady of Tangiers is a member of the Church of England, by the way.

I asked about the pretty boy I had met at the gate.

“That was my little grandson, Muli Hassan, going out for his afternoon’s
airing. All those people hanging about were waiting to see him start. To
them he is not only a noble, but a sacred person. My husband was of a
great family. He was descended from the Prophet,--but I am of the oldest
family in the world; I am of the Adam and Eve connection!” Her eyes
danced as she said it. “In certain respects, my grandchildren are
brought up English fashion, as my children were. When my oldest boy was
perhaps twelve days old, my mother, who had come out from England to be
with me, thought that it might please my husband’s old nurse to see the
baby have his bath; so she called her into my room. My husband was
asleep in a neighboring room. Suddenly he was waked by the old nurse,
she was past eighty, shaking him by the arm--usually she would not have
dared to disturb him--and crying:

“Come, come quickly! The Christians are murdering your son, they are
drowning him!”

My husband hurried to my room. “What does this mean?” he cried out. When
he found out what it meant, he threw himself down on the divan and
laughed till he cried.

When we had finished our tea, my hostess took me into the part of the
house where her son’s wife, the mother of Muli Hassan, lives. As she was
receiving native visitors in the reception room, the Lady of Tangiers
showed me into the bedroom; a large, handsome, airy room with windows
opening seawards, and comfortable brass beds. We had not been there
long,--I had not had time to take in half the beauty of the outlook from
those windows,--when I heard behind me the soft patter of bare feet on
the tiled floor, and the daughter-in-law was at my side. She was a
pretty woman, with a refined, intelligent face, who received me with a
charming Oriental reverence. The nails of her hands and feet were
reddened with henna, otherwise she was not painted. She wore a pretty,
simple, green tissue robe, with a robe of dotted muslin over it.

“May thy day be white as milk,” was her first greeting. Then, “How is
thy health?”

“She is sorry she cannot speak your language,” said the Lady of
Tangiers, “you must not think her an uneducated person on that account.
She reads and writes Arabic beautifully.”

The young woman was in mourning for a relative: she would wear it for
forty days, she told me. Her mourning consisted of not wearing silk or
jewels,--the most sensible mourning I ever heard of. She was so fair,
except for her melting eyes and coal-black eyebrows, that in European
dress she might easily have passed for an Italian. As the other guests
were waiting for the daughter-in-law, our visit to her was short.

“_Yalla bina_,” now let us go, said the elder woman.

“To Allah’s protection,” said the mother of Muli Hassan.

We returned to the English drawing-room, where I stayed as long, perhaps
longer, than good manners allowed, while the Lady of Tangiers told me
things that I hope she will some day tell the world. While I was
listening, entranced, there came the sound of a childish voice crying
“Grandmama!” The little Prince Muli Hassan had come back from his ride.
I had stayed an unconscionable time, and my visit, the most interesting
episode in all those interesting Moroccan days, had to come to an end!

While in Tangiers our party was much broken up. J. and Patsy made
several riding trips with Israel, leaving me to potter about the Socco
with Ali, or to prowl with Mme. Hortense in the bazaars, where I bought
a long, salmon colored cloth gabardine with wide sleeves and fascinating
silk buttons and loops; and a fine _sulham_ like the one the Arab
gentleman wore. Both are men’s garments, though they pass muster very
well, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar, for a woman’s.

Our greatest pleasure we all enjoy together,--a dinner at one of the
foreign villas on the heights. It was nearly dark when I mounted Zuleika
and rode under the stars and a thin crescent moon to our friend’s house.
All the company except ourselves belonged to the diplomatic circle. They
were as agreeable, well dressed, and well bred as such people are the
world over. The dinner was excellent, the talk, for me, of absorbing
interest. After dinner, as we were sitting talking together in the
pretty drawing-room, admiring the Arabic curios our host had collected,
we heard, faintly first, then gradually growing louder, the sound of a
shepherd’s pipe, like the flute in Tristan and Isolde.

“I thought you might like to hear a little Arab music,” said our host,
leading the way to an open-air concert room. In the corner made by two
sides of his house, rugs were spread upon the ground, lanterns hung
among the rose covered walls, and six native musicians squatted
on the ground. Their instruments were a lute, a tambourine, a
reban,--two-stringed fiddle--and the shepherd’s pipe. The leader was a
handsome dark man with dreamy eyes, and the face of an enthusiast. He
threw back his head and began a song that was like a wail; the others
joined in from time to time like a chorus.

“They are singing,” said the host, “the Lament for Granada!”

When anybody says Tangiers to me suddenly, _this_ is what I see! The
Arab musicians sitting cross-legged on the ground under the stars, and
the thin crescent moon. I hear the high wail of the Moorish pipe, the
throb of the drum struck by the hand, the voices of the Moorish
minstrels mourning for the Moors’ lost paradise, singing the Lament for
Granada.

X

MADRID

“Señora, this is my mother,” said Pedra the Vestal, who took care of our
sitting-room fire.

“I am glad to make your acquaintance,” said Pedra’s mother; she shook my
hand heartily, and looked at me with keen, kind eyes. “In regard to the
washing, I will call for it on Mondays and bring it back on Fridays. If
mending is required, there will be an additional price.”

“Where do you wash the clothes?”

She was astonished at the question. “In the river, where else?”

“And where do you hang them out to dry?”

“On the river bank, near the palace of the King.”

When Pedra the Vestal knelt on the hearth blowing the bellows, she
looked more than ever like a Tanagra figurine. She built up the fire
with odd little chunks of dark red wood that give out a strange perfume
of the forest, and burn as slowly as soft coal.

“What sort of wood is that?” I asked.

“Who knows? The wood of a tree,” Pedra looked over her shoulder with the
flashing smile that made everything she said pass for wit.

“I know; it is ilex,” said her mother. “In Segovia I used to gather it
on the mountain. Here it costs too much, we burn charcoal.”

“Is Madrid dearer than Segovia?”

“Madrid is the dearest place in the world, and the coldest.” She wrapped
her faded plaid shawl about her shoulders. There had been a slight snow
flurry that morning; it was proper Christmas weather, but Pedra and her
mother took it as seriously as we take a blizzard. Pedra was straight as
a lance, hard as marble, built of stuff that wears well, judging from
her mother. The elder woman was not one of those mothers who serve as a
dreadful warning of what a daughter may become, if she had lost youth
and freshness; she had kept her health and strength, a fiery spirit, a
tough fibre.

The next time she came in to mend the fire, Pedra’s bright eyes were
dull and red. It took only a little coaxing to find out her trouble.

“My mother brought bad news,” she said. “My brother has married a girl
who is not worthy of him. Though we are poor, Señora, our family is an
old one; there is none more respected in Segovia. After all the
sacrifices we made for Juan to keep on the little shop that was my
father’s,--to marry beneath him, it was unworthy, it was ignoble!” The
tears came to her eyes again. Here was Castilian pride, indeed.

We had come to Madrid meaning to keep house for six months or more. We
soon found that a furnished apartment at a moderate price in Madrid is
as rare as a roc’s egg. We spent several days driving up and down the
streets of the quarter where we wished to live, looking up at the
houses. A large sheet of blank paper hung at the end of a window or
balcony means unfurnished apartments to let, in the middle, furnished.
We could find nothing available. It seemed as if we must give up our
plan of passing the winter in Madrid. Then came the great invitation.
Our old friends Don José and Doña Lucia Villegas asked us to share their
large comfortable home. When we found they really wished us to accept
this unparalleled hospitality, J. and I moved over to their delightful
apartment, and Don Jaime found a modest hotel for Patsy.

The Villegas’ house is opposite the handsome new National Museum on the
Paseo Recoletos, a wide avenue laid out in the grand style of the Champs
Elysées.

Madrid is a modern capital; at first it seemed as if we had left
picturesque Spain behind us and come to a modern European city, a
little like Paris, a little like Brussels, and not at all like the Spain
we knew. Then, as we began to learn our way about the city, we found
that beside the new Madrid, with its splendid boulevards, its
conventional new houses and cafés, its air of prosperous business, there
was an old Madrid, full of quaint corners and picturesque buildings.

The palace of the King stands at the edge of this old Madrid, boldly
planted on the high land above the river, where the old Moorish Alcazar
once stood, a magnificent situation for a royal palace. The façade
fronts and dominates the city; the rear looks out on vast stretches of
royal demesne.

“This looks more as a palace should look than any I ever saw,” said
Patsy. We had driven over one sharp clear morning to see Guard-mounting.
“All grand and white and shining. The sort of a palace where lovely
princesses with golden hair always live in poetry,--sometimes even in
history.”

On the right of the palace is the noble Plaza de Armas, where, besides
the guards pacing up and down their beat, there was a continual coming
and going of all sorts and conditions of men. In a sheltered corner,
under the very palace windows, two boys were playing at marbles. This
was all in keeping with what we had seen and heard of the democratic
character of the people. At one end of the Plaza, the long narrow
arches of the peristyle frame a stupendous view. Behind the palace runs
the river Manzanares; beyond lies the royal park of the Casa de Campo,
with its masses of green trees, broken here and there by the glint of a
lake, or the spire of one of poor Isabel Second’s expiatory chapels.
Beyond the park, the bare plains of Castile sweep grandly to the north,
rising to the stern snow-capped range of the Sierra Guaderrama.

It was all dearly familiar, because Velasquez has painted that blue-gray
landscape, that silver light sometimes hardening to steel, those snow
mountains, not once, but many, many times, as the background of his
pictures.

“The Manzanares is not much of a stream compared to the Guadalquiver,”
said Patsy. “That must be the bridge the Frenchman meant, when he
advised the King of Spain either to sell his bridge, or to buy a river!”
He pointed to a big handsome bridge, curiously out of proportion to the
size of the meagre river.

Not far from the palace, along the river bank, was a gorgeous,
tremulous, swaying mass of color,--scarlet, blue, orange, every tint of
the rainbow.

“That,” said Patsy, “looks like the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Those
might be the fluttering pennons of Leon and Castile, Navarre and
Aragon.”

“Don’t look too closely, or you will lose the illusion. That is the
drying ground, where Pedra’s mother and the other washerwomen of Madrid
hang out their clothes.”

“Standards of heroes, standards of heroines, what’s the odds? They _are_
heroines. I stood and watched them yesterday, their petticoats kilted up
to their knees, rubbing and scrubbing and singing at their work.”

A young American artist painted an admirable picture of the drying
ground with its many-colored garments not long ago. He worked in summer,
close to the river when the water was low, and caught a fever that put
an end to all his painting!

Fronting the palace is the large oval Plaza del Oriente, with a good
equestrian statue of Philip IV, surrounded by a circle of quaint marble
statues of Visigothic and Spanish kings and queens, from Berenguela to
Isabel the Catholic.

“We know Philip IV better than all the rest of them put together!” Patsy
exclaimed, as we walked round the royal group. “Thanks to the genius for
making a likeness of that young man shown by Velasquez, whom he engaged
as his _valet de chambre_ at a salary of eleven dollars a month. Philip
young, thin and cadaverous, Philip old, fat and blowsy; I know his face
as well as I know my own. People who want to be remembered by posterity
should be very polite to the painters and sculptors--even to the
writers--of their day. Strange they don’t realize it!”

Madrid was gay with Christmas bustle; streets and shops were crowded;
Pedra was busy with the presents that poured into the house for Lucia
and Villegas. From Granada came a cask of oil, from Malaga a small
barrel of grapes, from Jerez a cask of olorosa, from Tangiers a box of
oranges, from Seville a flagon of cologne, the finest in the world,--it
smells of fresh orange blossoms.

One morning, a few days before Christmas, I heard a strange hob-gobbling
noise outside in the passage. I opened my door; there was Pedra, flushed
and out of breath with the effort, trying to get two large speckled
turkeys up the terrace stairs.

“_Miré_,” she said, “observe these fine birds, Señora, a present from
the country. I shall mix a dish of corn meal and hot water for them,
that will be the food of luxury, fattening besides. Poor animals! they
shall live well until Cisera wrings their necks.”

Cisera, the Tuscan cook, followed the procession up the terrace stairs,
and felt the larger turkey.

“In a week,” she said, “he will be fit to kill, perhaps sooner.”

When the turkeys had been fed with the food of luxury, Pedra showed me
another gift that had just come for Villegas. “Don José will like this
more than all the rest, you will see!” she said.

Villegas is the Director of the Prado Museum. What Pedra called the best
present was a “testimonial,” with his photograph and a complimentary
address signed by all the employees of the Prado. He gave the dreadful
thing with its impossible plush frame the place of honor, and hung it up
himself in the hall.

Cisera killed the larger turkey, and stuffed it with pistacchio nuts for
the Christmas eve dinner-party. As we were all sitting together, waiting
for the last guest to arrive, Gil, the melancholy Gallegan man-servant,
threw open the door and announced:

“The Bohemian Gentleman.”

A big blond man with dancing blue eyes and a ruffled shirt came in,
followed by Pedra, carrying in her upraised hands a tray with two
enormous hams (she looked like the picture of Titian’s daughter with the
fruit).

“A good Christmas!” the Bohemian made Lucia a grand bow. “I have brought
you a pair of hams from Prague!”

“The best hams in the world,” Villegas patted one of them. “I was afraid
you had forgotten this year!”

“They should be good; the pigs were raised on

[Illustration: DETAIL FROM “THE MAIDS OF HONOR.” _Velasquez_]

my father’s farm, and, I was assured, were fed on nothing but milk.”

Before the turkey made its appearance, Villegas had discovered that
among his guests were people of seven nationalities, and that four
languages were being spoken at the table.

“This,” he said, “is the Tower of Babel.” The name stuck for as long at
least as that hospitable house was our home.

“What,” I asked Don Jaime who sat beside me, “is the Bohemian
gentleman’s name?”

“Of baptism or of family?”

“Both, particularly of family.”

“Ah!” the Don relapsed into Spanish, “nobody can pronounce it; it begins
with a cough and ends with a sneeze. He is called Don Carlos the
Bohemian, because he comes from Bohemia. He copies royal portraits in
the Prado for the Archduke Eugenio of Austria; no one has made such
copies of Velasquez since Villegas left off painting them!” The Bohemian
saw we were speaking of him, for he looked over at us.

“This lady, whose name I did not catch,” he said, “is an American?”

“Oh, no!” cried little Serafita, who gives music lessons to the Infanta;
“she is English, Yankee, from New York.” In Madrid, American means South
American, unless the contrary is stated.

I asked Serafita, a sparkling Andaluz with a drop of Hebrew blood in her
veins, if many of her pupils worked seriously. “Only a few,” she said,
“more give up their music when they marry. It is the same with their
other studies. The women I know drop their reading and studies when they
leave school. If one cannot talk with them about the fashions or the
last ball, they have nothing to say. You North American women can speak
on every subject. Our women are not less clever, but our men do not wish
us to be improved, for they know that we are naturally more intelligent
than they themselves, and if our minds were cultivated they believe we
would not be content always to stay at home.”

Villegas had lately sat for his photograph, and as Lucia wished opinions
on the likeness, the photographs were handed round the table. When they
came to Don Jaime he counted them, and told me that there were twelve,
and all alike, adding with a sigh that if there were only twelve
Villegases, all alike, and he could dine with all of them, he could then
be sure of twelve such dinners a year!

Before Villegas came to Madrid, and took Don Jaime under his wing, the
Don often had no dinner--so he confided to Patsy. One does not exactly
dine when one spends two cents a day for food. “Under such
circumstances,” the Don said, “it is best to invest all your money in
bread of the day before; it costs less than fresh bread, and goes
farther.”

While we were still at table, there came a tremendous ringing at the
door-bell. There was a lull in the conversation as Gil opened the front
door. “A message and a box from the bedchamber of the King for Don
José!” cried a loud voice in the hall outside.

“Put down the box. Don José is dining,” Gil replied firmly.

“Give him the message then as I give it to thee. Here are the pantaloons
of his Majesty the King. They must be returned by the fifteenth of the
month, when his Majesty wishes to wear them.”

We looked at each other in astonishment.

“I am painting the King’s portrait,” said Villegas; “as he is not very
fond of posing they have sent me the clothes to work from before the
next sitting.”

“The Infanta’s wedding is on the eighteenth,” said Lucia; “perhaps they
are wanted for that. Be sure nothing happens to them at the studio.”

It was nearly twelve when the Bohemian, the first to make the move, rose
to go. They keep late hours in Madrid, even later than in Paris. Don
Carlos was reproved for breaking up the party so early.

“I promised,” he said by way of excuse, “to be at the Countess Q’s for
midnight mass.”

“I should not have thought that _misa del gallo_--cockcrow mass was
exactly in your line!” said Don Jaime. “You grow devout with years!”

“Ah, well--I know the music will be good, they will give selections from
Carmen. Besides, I promised I would stay and help them out with the
supper and dance after the mass.”

Just then Gil brought in a curiously shaped old bottle covered with dust
and cobwebs.

“Try this before you go,” said Villegas; “it is Trafalgar 1805, the year
of the great vintage of Jerez and of the great battle.” He himself
poured out the wine, with greatest care not to shake the bottle.

“It is good enough,” said the Bohemian, with another of his grand bows,
“to drink to Doña Lucia’s health, and,” raising his glass, “to the
portrait of the King.”

“The portrait of the King!” We drank the toast standing.

The next morning we walked over to the studio with Villegas and Lucia,
Gil following with the box from the bedchamber of the King. As we left
the Tower of Babel, Cisera came running after us.

“Don José, you have forgotten your brushes;” she put a bundle of
paint-brushes done up in a newspaper into his hand. Villegas tucked
them in his pocket and thanked Cisera; it is her privilege to wash the
brushes, and she allows no one else to touch them. The studio is in the
Pasaje del Alhambra, rather a picturesque place for Madrid, not more
than half a mile from the house. Though it was late, after ten o’clock,
the streets were very uncomfortable on account of the floods of water
pouring through them. The extreme dryness of the soil and the air makes
it necessary to flush the streets twice a day! A pair of wild looking
gypsy girls were standing by one of the corners, watching the water
pouring from the hydrant. The taller girl was very handsome, the shorter
one seemed older, and had an ill-tempered face, with a head shaped like
a snake’s. They stood gaping at us with the dazed look of country people
unused to a city. They were so poorly dressed I rather thought they
would beg of us.

“What a type!” said Villegas, looking at the handsome girl, a beauty
with rough black hair hanging over the eyes, and a half fierce, half shy
expression.

“What character in that head, eh?”

“She has exactly the face you have been looking for,” said Lucia. “Ask
her to come to the studio and pose.”

They spoke to the handsome girl, who seemed to agree. At this the elder
girl caught her by the arm and dragged her back.

“No, no, you shall not go!” she cried. “Do you know what he will do? He
will look you in the eyes fixedly, fixedly, like this, and while he is
looking at you, he will suck your blood!” At this the two took to their
heels and ran for dear life.

“You see how difficult it is to get models in Madrid!” Villegas laughed.
“One is driven here, by force, to paint portraits!”

We were passing a house in a garden where an old retired General and his
old wife sat opposite each other on the porch in large covered invalid
chairs, keeping a sharp lookout on all passers-by. They were both deaf,
and imagining other people heard no better than they, talked quite
audibly about the people in the street.

“There goes Villegas, the painter,” said the wife. “He seems amused
about something.” (Don José had laughed to tears over the gypsy’s
warning). “What do you suppose his servant is carrying in that big box?”

“What ridiculous curiosity,” growled the General; “isn’t it the same old
box?”

“No, I never saw it before. I wonder what he _has_ got in it!”

As we reached the corner of the Barquillo, Villegas exclaimed: “There’s
the Novio. He must have been ill, he looks rather pale; I haven’t seen
him for a week.” The novio, a pallid young man in a plaid suit, stood in
a protected angle of the side-walk, looking up at a window at the top of
a high house where a roguish girl’s face looked out from between the
curtains. The young man was talking with his fingers in the deaf and
dumb language.

“He talks so fast I cannot read what he says,” said Villegas. “But one
can guess; one has either heard or said such things oneself, is it not
so?”

At the opposite corner the old flower woman, who sat stooping and
huddled under her black shawls like the eldest of the Fates, chose from
her stock a white hyacinth and silently handed it to Villegas, who gave
her a coin, took the flower and walked briskly on. The old woman sat up
a little straighter, after he had passed, and set her flowers in better
order. It is characteristic of Villegas that people always sit up
straighter and put their affairs in better order when he has passed
their way.

Angoscia, the glove-maker of Granada, who takes care of the studio, and
serves as a draped model, opened the studio door: it is almost
impossible in Madrid to get either male or female models to pose for the
nude. Angoscia is a pretty young woman with an almost perfect face,
beautiful hands and feet, but with a tendency to grow stout.

“You have been eating maccaroni again!” said Lucia.

“No, no, I swear by the Virgin I have not. I eat nothing, I starve
myself, I am hungry always.”

“Or _torrones_. You are much fatter than before Christmas; that comes of
giving you a holiday!”

Poor Angoscia, looking worthy of her name--it means anguish--made a
diversion by asking what we had brought in the box. Lucia, with her
help, then unpacked a fine cocked hat, a red and blue military coat and
waistcoat, a pair of short white cloth knee breeches, the belt linings
and pockets of heaviest satin, a dainty sword and sword belt. Angoscia
drew the damascened Toledo blade, pretty as a toy, cruel as death, from
its sheath; it glinted in the sun and flashed its reflection in her soft
brave eyes. Everything in the box was most carefully packed, each silver
button and bit of silver lace separately wrapped in black tissue paper
to keep it from tarnishing. At the very bottom of the box was a long
thin morocco case. This I opened, gave a scream, and almost dropped the
case that contained the ensign of the Order of the Garter. The garter
was of dark blue velvet bordered with gold. The letters were separate,
of very thick gold, attached by invisible rivets to the velvet. After
the legend “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense” the velvet strap was heavily
embroidered in gold thread, the tab and buckle were finely chased gold.

“A beautiful piece of work!” Villegas turned it over in his hand and
nodded approval. How all good workmen feel a good piece of work!

“Edward the Black Prince was made the first knight of the Order of the
Garter after Crécy, when he brought the great ruby back from Spain,”
said J.

“Where is it worn?” That was a serious question. By this time the
clothes were on the mannikin, the palette was set, Villegas unrolled the
great sheaf of brushes, and was ready to go to work.

“On the left leg below the knee,” said J. There was some argument on the
point, finally settled by appeal to a Van Dyke portrait in the Prado.

“They have forgotten the shoes!” cried Angoscia.

“There is nothing remarkable about them: any low evening pumps will do
till the next sitting,” said Villegas.

“Mariano Benlliure has a pair!” cried Jaime, and went off in a cab to
borrow them. He came back with two pairs of patent leather pumps nicely
fitted on wooden lasts.

“Mariano must be very rich,” said Jaime. “I will pawn the pair you don’t
use, send him the ticket, and when he wants to wear them he can redeem
the shoes.”

At last the mannikin was dressed with the King’s clothes and put in the
right pose and Villegas got to work. He did not like to paint from the
mannikin; he said it looked too stiff, and would spoil the portrait, but
that it would be impossible to put the King’s clothes on a model!

“If Don Alfonzo had only given me a sitting instead of going hunting
to-day!” he sighed, squeezing more yellow ochre on his palette to paint
the garter; “I should like to have gone into the country too!”

“A hundred years from now who will care whether the King went hunting
to-day or not? Somebody may be glad that you stayed in your studio and
worked.”

“_Quien sabé?_” sighed Villegas.

“He is never satisfied!” said Lucia.

“The day he is satisfied, he will be finished!” laughed J. Villegas, who
likes company when he works, and can endure a dozen people talking in
the studio without listening to a word that is said, went steadily on
with his painting, laying on the bold, firm strokes of color in a manner
all his own.

In those days there was much to do in Madrid about the Infanta Maria
Teresa’s wedding. The trousseau and presents were exhibited in the great
dining-hall of the palace. The jewels given by the King, Queen Maria
Cristina, and the bridegroom, Prince Ferdinand of Bavaria, were said to
be fabulously fine. There were fifty dresses with shoes to match, among
other items, and all the rest of the outfit was on the same scale. The
bridegroom and his parents arrived in Madrid some days before the
wedding. His mother, the Infanta Paz, was the sister of the bride’s
father, Alfonzo XII, so it was a family affair and a deal of
entertaining went on in the palace of the King. Prince Max of Bavaria,
the bridegroom’s father, took little part in the merrymaking, but
slipped off whenever he could to the hospitals to have a look at the
interesting cases, and compare notes with his confrères, the surgeons.
The story was told of his coming home late to lunch one day, and saying
to the guests invited to meet him, “I have made such a successful
operation this morning; cut off a man’s leg. It all went well; the
patient stood it admirably!”

“Even royalties are becoming emancipated,” said Patsy; “they have
practically gone on strike. Can you blame a man for refusing to spend
his life standing round waiting on the chance that he may be wanted to
fill a throne? Here you have a royal explorer, like the Duke of Abruzzi,
and a royal surgeon, like Prince Max, real professionals, not amateurs;
what are we coming to next?”

We were driving along the gay crowded Calle Acalá, on our way to the
wedding.

“They have a fine day,” Patsy went on. “I saw a few icicles on the
fountain of Cebele this morning, but they’re all melted now. At home we
should call this mild weather for January; here they act as if it were
ten below zero.”

Every carriage or automobile we passed was hermetically sealed; not a
crack of a window was left open, and the Madrileños were muffled in furs
to the eyes. The climate of Madrid is not half so black as it is
painted; half the bronchitis and lung troubles we hear about come from
too much wrapping up and too little fresh air! The only open carriages
to be seen in Madrid at this season belong to the royal family. They set
a good example in that direction, at least.

The chapel royal of the palace, where the wedding took place, leads from
the glass enclosed gallery that surrounds the courtyard at the second
story, and communicates with the bedchamber of the King and the other
private apartments. Each door is guarded day and night by two tall
halberdiers, in whose hands lies the safety of the King. They are picked
men, the very flower of the army, the type of Spanish soldier history
and romance have made familiar. They look as fierce, proud, and terrible
as the men who marched with Cortes. The young officer in lovely white
broadcloth uniform and shining feathered helmet, who took us in charge
at the palace door, delivered us over into the hands of a halberdier in
a cocked hat and short clothes, who led us through the gallery, empty
save for the guards pacing up and down. The four men on duty at the
chapel door stood like breathing statues; they never moved their eyes;
they hardly seemed to wink. Though they were relieved every fifteen
minutes, as long as flesh and blood can stand the strain, one of the big
handsome fellows fainted, before his quarter of an hour was over.

Our halberdier--his name was Pedro--led us up a private stairway covered
with a blue Aubusson carpet, sprinkled with roses and lilies so lifelike
that you could almost pick them, then to a little, dark, secret stair
leading to the grated balcony, where we were to sit, as if in a private
stage box, and see the royal wedding. We were spectators, not guests, as
only the Court and the diplomatic circle were admitted to the floor of
the chapel. Don Jaime soon joined us; he had made the unprecedented
sacrifice of getting up at ten o’clock, so that he might tell us who all
the great personages were.

“To the left sit members of Government and his wifes. Next Greats of
Spain”--usually called Grandees--“Major-domos-de-semana, Gentilhombres,
_corps diplomatique_, authorities, mayor and members of city, dames of
court, generals, chamberlains, suite of bridegroom.”

“_Solo Madrid es corte_;” only at Madrid is there a court, according to
the old saying. The arrival of this famous Spanish court was the most
impressive feature of the whole gorgeous pageant. The ladies, wearing
long velvet trains and white mantillas, entered the chapel one by one,
bowed before the altar, crossed themselves, and with consummate grace
and dignity, above all with perfect calm, made their way to their
places, where they spread out their trains and settled themselves like
so many brilliant birds of paradise. There was no noise, no confusion,
no crowding; it had all been calculated to a nicety. There was plenty of
time, and plenty of space for everybody; this above all else made for
the great distinction of the ceremony. The Chinese minister and
secretary, in their embroidered silk gowns, their mandarin caps and
peacock feathers, were the most picturesque figures in the diplomatic
tribune. Chief among the Grandees were the Knights of the Golden Fleece.
Patsy asked the name of one whose face seemed familiar.

“Is Pidal, Duke of Veragua,” said Jaime. “He receive the order on the
anniversary of 1892, as proof of worthy to be descendant of Columbus. He
is the elevator of the finest bulls in Spain; you will see them at the
next _corrida_.”

“Are all the seven Spanish Knights of the Golden Fleece here?”

“No, not Count Cheste. Has nineteen seven years, is more ancient of army
and of literature. It is a poet.”

The King’s clothes had been returned in plenty of time for the wedding;
care had been taken of them, they looked as good as new when, to the
music of the Lohengrin march, Don Alfonzo walked into the chapel,
leading the bride with one hand, the bridegroom with the other.

“It’s just like the opera,” Patsy whispered. “Wagner made no mistakes in
his stage directions; he knew all the traditions of the Bavarian Court,
and must have seen a royal wedding or two.”

The bride wore orange blossoms in her hair; the front of her satin dress
sparkled with diamonds, the train of white velvet, bordered with ostrich
feathers, hung from the shoulders and was carried by a page.

“Her code is three metres long,” the Don told us.

The bride knelt at the altar, made her first prayer, then crossed the
church, passing the three officiating cardinals in their arrogant
scarlet robes, to the prie-dieu where her mother knelt apart from all
the rest. She stooped, and raised the Queen’s hand to her lips. The
Queen, who wept openly throughout the ceremony, kissed her cheek; the
bride then rejoined the bridegroom, a kind looking, round-faced young
man, with thick brown hair. The ceremony was performed by the Archbishop
of Toledo, Cardinal primate of Spain, a subtle-faced old man with silver
hair and benevolent manners. The King knew his mass perfectly; he kissed
his prayer-book and crossed himself at all the proper times, and
throughout the service prompted the bridegroom, who seemed ill prepared
and had evidently not been so well drilled.

“_Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!_” the King struck his breast
three times with his clenched fist, as he said the words.

“What do you suppose Don Alfonzo’s _maxima culpa_ is?” murmured Patsy.
“I don’t believe he has had much chance to commit one. Villegas might
say it is his not liking to pose. Some old fogy might say it was his
habit of riding his horse up the palace stairs. I would not give a fig
for a young man in his position who didn’t do that; it is a time-honored
custom of gay young princes! It wasn’t _his_ fault that he was born a
king; he can’t be expected to forfeit all the fun he might otherwise
have enjoyed as heir to the throne!”

While the Archbishop knotted the white satin scarf, symbol of the
marriage tie, about the young couple’s shoulders, Don Jaime hurried us
down to the gallery to see the cortége pass from the chapel to the
private apartments. Our halberdier, Pedro, had kept us a place opposite
the chapel door. The gallery was lined with these superb guards. They
stood shoulder to shoulder, their steel halberds flashing in the
sunlight that streamed through the glass sides of the gallery.

“The _alabardaros_,” Don Jaime explained, “are a particularity, all must
be of so great length.” He added that they all held rank two grades
below what they had held in the army; that the soldiers had been
sergeants and the general formerly a field marshal.

The fateful music of Mendelssohn’s march thrilled through the gallery,
the waiting crowd behind the halberdiers swayed at the sound as
wind-flowers shaken by the wind.

The wedding party came out of the chapel behind four mace bearers,
stalwart men in black velvet, with gold maces over their shoulders.

“The Infanta Isabel, the King’s aunt, _es muy Española_!” she is very
Spanish--whispered Jaime as a gray-haired, hearty-looking woman passed,
bowing and smiling.

“I like her,” said Patsy; “she looks a thoroughly good sort; she has
twice been heir to the throne, before the birth of her brother Alfonzo
XII, and again after his death, before our Don Alfonzo was born. Trying,
wasn’t it? She seems to be the most popular of the elder members of the
family.”

The Infanta Eulalia is not so well known as her sister, the Infanta
Isabel, because she has been little in Spain and prefers to live in
Paris. She looked very much as she did when she was in Chicago, at the
time of the World’s Fair, very elegant, very graceful, more
cosmopolitan, less _Española_ than her sister.

The Queen walked with Don Alfonzo. She wore a long ash colored dress, a
white lace mantilla, a diamond diadem, and the finest pearls I ever saw.
She neither bowed nor smiled.

In the clear sunlight of the gallery, at a range of ten feet, one saw
the dreadful look of suffering in her face. It must have been a trying
day for her. Her eldest daughter, Princess of the Asturias, had died
only a year before, leaving four little children: _her_ marriage had
been so unpopular that it nearly caused a revolution, and there had been
none of the rejoicing and merrymaking her sister, the Infanta Maria, was
enjoying. Besides this recent grief, what bitter memories must have
surged up in the Queen’s heart. Her own marriage and all of the tragedy
and suffering that it held. Hers had been a state marriage; her
bridegroom met her at the altar with a heart still sore for his adored
Mercedes, his first wife dead in the first year of their marriage. Then
came her husband’s early death, after a cruel, lingering illness; the
summoning together of the ministers, to whom she announced that there
was still hope of an heir, for besides her three daughters, she was
again with child: the birth of that child, Alfonzo XIII, one of the very
few who have been born King, twenty years of passionate devotion to the
care of the delicate boy’s health, his education, his religious
training. Twenty years of intense, unresting effort to keep the throne
for her son,--all this among a people to whom she was ever “the
Austrian,” is still the Outlander. And now, after all that she has done,
another woman is to usurp her place. Her son will marry within the year
a woman who has been bred a Protestant.

As she passed, without a look at the people, it seemed that for once the
mask of the Queen had dropped from the grief-ravaged face of the woman.

The young people were in the gayest mood. Don Alfonzo nodded and smiled
to right and left, the bride and bridegroom came along, laughing and
talking together, like any other happy young couple. There was youth and
hope in their faces; they were still far from the stereotyped bow, the
dreadful mechanical smile of the elder royalties.

“_Felicidad eternal!_” said Don Jaime, as the bride passed us.

“A good word,” Patsy echoed it as the doors closed behind the wedding
party. “Eternal felicity, may they be as happy as if they had not been
born in the shadow of a throne.”

[Illustration: DETAILS FROM “THE SURRENDER OF BREDA.” _Velasquez_]

XI

THE PRADO

    _Por las calles de Madrid_
    _se pasea un valenciano_
    _con un clavel en la boca_
    _y una rosa en cada mano._

    Through the streets of Madrid
    A Valencian was straying
    With a pink in his mouth
    And a rose in each hand.

Little Don Luis the Valencian took the pink from his mouth, when he met
Villegas coming up the steps of the Prado Museum. “I was going away,” he
said, “but I will turn back with you. Anything for an excuse not to go
to work!”

“Work!” Villegas fairly snorted! “You call painting work, when it is the
only thing you like to do? Caramba! There are some things in this world
hard to understand!” Villegas was disappointed. He had waited an hour at
the studio for Luz, who never came for her sitting; this was quite
natural the day after the court ball.

The head porter met us at the door; any of the famous painters whose
pictures hang in the room of the great portraits might have been glad to
have him for a sitter. He was a handsome man of the grave Castilian
type, with a big, square black beard and skin like alabaster. He wore a
broadcloth overcoat down to his heels and a gold laced cap.

“These are my friends,” Villegas introduced us. “You will give them any
help they may need.”

The porter bowed gravely and we all followed Villegas into the Museum.
He had come to make his morning rounds, and little Don Luis offered to
be our guide while he looked over his mail.

“I was too discouraged to paint to-day,” said Don Luis, “so I came for
help to the great artists, whose work is here. They seem to hold out
their hands to me, and say: ‘we have travelled the road you find so
hard; we, too, have known discouragement and despair!’ I always go away
from the Museum as from the company of my best friends, full of courage
and hope.”

“The way I feel, after seeing a play of Shakespeare’s,” murmured Patsy.
“Clever work discourages you; great work puts heart into you, makes you
feel you can go home and do something as good, that you might even have
done that.”

Villegas, who loves the pictures under his care as if they were his
children, is not satisfied with the Prado, and is always hoping they may
some day have a museum worthy of them.

“The three arts should be united, as they were in Greece,” he said.
“Oh, for a building that should be as a perfect casket for the two
jewels, painting and sculpture. Other museums may illustrate the history
of art better than the Prado, none possesses more masterpieces of
painting!”

“He has performed miracles since he became Director,” said Don Luis;
“not only in the care and hanging of the pictures, but against the risk
of fire. He has put in all the latest fire extinguishing apparatus. He
is right, though, we must have a new building, and, it appears to me, he
will get it for us!”

The Prado was built for a Natural History Museum, and the light in many
rooms, especially on the upper floor, is very bad. Many valuable
pictures cannot be shown for want of space, others can hardly be seen
for lack of light. In spite of these drawbacks, the Prado is the most
delightful Museum I know. It soon became to us, as to Don Luis, a second
home. The first impression is of an immense hospitality; there is no
entrance fee to pay; the Museum is free to all. Then the guardians are
all so kind and, nearly all, so good-looking. The man who takes your
umbrella or walking stick treats you with courtesy and respect, not, as
in some galleries, as if you were a criminal or a lunatic bent on poking
holes in the canvases.... Every museum has its climate or atmosphere;
the climate of the Prado is genial and cordial beyond compare.

The first impression we received of the pictures was a great joy that
there are so many surprises among them. A few of the Velasquez and the
Murillos we knew already, but as a whole the collection is less familiar
than any other I have ever seen. The vast majority of the pictures were
new to us. No work of art that has become well known through endless
copies and reproductions can make the impression these undreamed-of
splendors make. As Patsy said, “they hit you hard like love at first
sight!”

Last, but not least, the Prado is comfortable! It has wood floors, and
is properly warmed. You can spend a morning there without that fear of
catching cold that haunts you in the chill marble-paved galleries of
Italy.

In the long hall of the Spanish School, Villegas joined us. We were
looking at a portrait of Marianna of Austria, the second wife of Philip
IV.

“This is a copy of the Velasquez made by his son-in-law, Maza,” said Don
José. “It formerly passed as a replica by Velasquez himself.”

“And how do you know now that it is not?” asked Patsy.

“You shall see.” Don José called an attendant, and ordered that the copy
be carried into the

[Illustration: THE TIPPLERS. _Velasquez_]

Velasquez room and placed beside the great original.

“Observe that it lacks the extraordinary silvery tone peculiar to
Velasquez and, besides, is too accurate a copy! Velasquez would never
have had patience to copy mere accidents of brush-marks, or kinks in the
folds of the dress, if he had been copying one of his own pictures. He
would preserve the tone, the spirit, the pose of the original, but he
would not go seeking to make the same strokes with his brush. The very
mechanical accuracy helps to prove this a copy made by a faithful pupil;
thus it is!”

The sixty-seven Velasquez pictures are all together in one room. They
are admirably hung, in the chronological order they were painted, so
that you can follow the painter’s work from the beginning to the end.
The impression produced is of a wonderful living autobiography. Every
picture is a page on which you may read some momentous event in the
artist’s life. You trace his development from the Adoration of the
Kings, the earliest picture, to St. Anthony the Abbot visiting St. Paul,
perhaps the latest. It is an autobiography that cannot be read at a
glance. In that first visit, made in the company of artists to whom the
Velasquez room is holy as Mecca to the Mahommedan, I was introduced to
the genius who, for the next six months, I was to study and try to
understand.

“Why did Velasquez paint so many pictures of fools, dwarfs and
gabaloonzy men?” Patsy asked. We were looking at the portrait of El
Primo, the dwarf, holding in his tiny hands a big book, looking out from
under his slouch hat and long feather with the humpback’s sharp, uncanny
eyes.

“Because he could always get one of them to sit for him when the royal
sitters disappointed him,” sighed Villegas; “they had more time than the
courtiers, and were perhaps the most vigorous and characteristic
subjects for painting of all the people he lived among.”

We passed on to the idiot Child of Vallecas. The poor, vacant face seems
to flicker at you from the canvas, the weak, wasted hands with the pack
of cards never took hold of anything, not even life itself, save with a
faltering grasp. At first, when you begin to study Velasquez, you feel
it monstrous that his genius should have been wasted on such ridiculous
deformities; in the end you accept them all, for the sake of the genius
that has immortalized them.

“Look at that hand!” said Villegas, as we were standing before the
portrait of Montañez, the sculptor. “How it is painted! With nothing,
you may say--zip-zap, two strokes of the brush, and it is a

[Illustration: DUKE OF OLIVARES. _Velasquez_]

hand. To create something out of nothing--colossal!”

“That is a good copy,” said J. A canvas, still wet, stood on an easel
near the Montañez.

“Ah, yes--you may say so. That is made by an American--a certain Hibson;
he has talent if you will; he will arrive! notice what I say, that man
will go far.”

In Spanish G is pronounced H. The “Hibson,” of whom Villegas foretold
great and serious things, the new star on the artistic horizon, in an
earlier incarnation, achieved fame as the creator of the Gibson Girl!

“I saw that effect of sky this morning. Velasquez painted that
background on a day like this.”

We were standing before the portrait of the Duke de Olivarez, with the
bare blue plains of Castile and the snow-capped Guaderrama behind him.
You feel the keen, clear air with the bite of the wind from the snow
mountains, as you look at that picture of the Duke on his prancing
war-horse of the best Arabo-Velasquez breed!

“Look at that dog! It is nothing, painted with nothing, when you look
close at it; take two steps backwards, and it is everything.”

It was the dog in the Meninas, one of the details Villegas never failed
to look at as he passed.

“That is a canine dog,” said Patsy. “Dogs in pictures almost always
have a human expression. These of Velasquez look as dogs must look to
each other; it is as if they were painted by one of themselves!”

The Meninas has a separate room to itself. Look at the picture long
enough, and the illusion seizes you that you are really looking into a
room of the gloomy old palace of the Alcazar, the Court of Philip IV,
where Velasquez lived and worked the greater part of his working life.
You can walk into that room where he stands at work before a big canvas,
look over his shoulder, see the portrait he is painting of the King and
Queen; you can even touch him on the arm that supports his palette.

“He paints pictures no longer,” cried little Don Luis the Valencian.
“Like a god he creates a world with light and atmosphere, plains and
mountains. Into that world he puts kings and queens, buffoons and
beggars.”

“And soldiers and horses!” said Villegas, stopping before the “Surrender
of Breda,” a great spacious picture with a gray-blue sky, and room
enough in it for all the sublimity of victory, the tragedy of defeat. In
the background the distant town of Breda still smokes from the
besiegers’ shells. In the nearer distance, marching up the hill, is a
company of the victorious soldiers armed with the long lances that give
the picture its nickname. The men’s faces are grave, they show no
exultation to the group of the defeated enemy standing opposite to them.
In the foreground Justino de Nassau, the defender of Breda, offers the
key of the city to the victorious general Spinola. De Nassau’s knee is
slightly bent--it is a stubborn knee and hard to bend--as he holds out
the key. Spinola has neither hand free to take it; one holds his baton,
the other is laid in what seems almost an embrace, on De Nassau’s
shoulder. “Take back your key,” he seems to say. “To-day it was our turn
to win; to-morrow it may be yours.”

What was it Grant said to Lee about needing the horses for the spring
plowing? There you have the magnanimous spirit of Velasquez’s “Surrender
of Breda” in a nutshell.

“My friend,” said Villegas to a stout German artist, who was working
away in grim earnest at a copy of the “Lances”; “your color is too hot,
remember the cool silver-grays; always try for them!”

“_Ach Gott_, you have said it!” cried the poor man, squinting from his
copy to the original; “why could I not myself before have seen it?” Then
he broke into profuse thanks to the Herr Director, who hurried on to
escape them.

“I have a plan,” said Villegas, “for a new arrangement of this room.”
We had passed into the long gallery of the Spanish School, from which
the Velasquez room opens. “Here, opposite this entrance, I shall hang
the Titian portrait of Charles V on his war-horse; it is too much
sacrificed where it is now. Near this I shall hang some Tintorettos and
some Grecos. In this way it will be possible to trace the influence of
each of these masters on the other: the influence of Titian on
Tintoretto, of Tintoretto on Greco, of Greco on Velasquez.”

The head porter, who had come hurrying up to Villegas, now delivered his
message.

“They have telephoned from the Palace that the King of Portugal will be
at the Museum in half an hour.”

These sudden entrances of royalty upon the scene added enormously to the
interest of our life in Madrid. The marriage of the Infanta, the
betrothal and the marriage of the King brought more royal visitors to
Madrid that season than usual, and they all came to the Prado. The
Museum has for them an especial attraction apart from the artistic
interest. The Prado contains portraits of the ancestors of most of the
royal personages in Europe, and they are naturally interested in seeing
their family portraits. The collection begun by Charles V, and
constantly added to by his descendants, is essentially a royal
collection. Isabel II generously

[Illustration: VENUS AND CUPID. _Velasquez_]

gave the pictures to the Spanish nation. How generously that gift is
shared with the artists and art lovers of all nations, every visitor to
the Prado knows.

Villegas hurried off to prepare for the visit of Don Carlos, the King of
Portugal, and little Don Luis, still glad of an excuse not to go back to
work, offered to take me to see Don Carlos the Bohemian. We found him in
a big barrack of a lumber-room smelling of paint, turpentine and
varnish, at the top of the Prado. He was at work on a copy of the
disputed portrait of Don John of Austria. He threw down his palette and
ran to meet Don Luis, rumpling up his hair with desperate hands.

“Was I mad to undertake it?” he cried. “It is the fourth Antonio Moro I
have copied. Not another, not for a million.”

“Not for a million, no; what couldst thou do with it? But for--well,
something else--yes, as many as thy grand duke will find room for in his
museum!”

“The work that accursed Fleming put into a picture. I tell thee it is
brutal to work so hard; he had the patience of a saint!”

“Or a Coello or a Pantoja. It is not a Moro! Thou hast some patience
thyself; it is not bad, thy copy!” Don Luis looked critically at it; “a
little crude. How many glazes hast thou given it?”

“Only eight.”

“Ah! thou seest? thou wilt get the tone soon. There is nothing wrong
with the drawing; the worst of the work is over with that.”

“Blessed be thy mouth!”

Don John, the Conqueror of Lepanto, is a young man standing with the
lion of Alcazaba at his side. He wears a shirt of mail the rings as fine
as those of a lady’s purse, and every ring is painted. The fringe of the
cushion is painted thread by thread, you can almost count the hairs in
the moustache.

“How can you know where to begin?” I asked. The copying of this
life-sized full length, painted with the detail of a miniature, seemed a
desperate undertaking.

“I know how the devil worked! I studied and studied him till I got his
secret; ah, there is no one like him; he is a despair! See, first I draw
everything in black, white and gray, down to the last detail, then I get
my tone with a series of thin glazes. Each one must be quite hard and
dry before I give it the next. It takes a lifetime, you may say!”

A delightful copy of the Velasquez portrait of little Prince Baltasar
with the gun and the dog stood against the wall. “Thou hast a good thing
there,” said Don Luis; “and once Velasquez was hard for thee to copy!”

[Illustration: DON BALTAZAR CARLOS. _Velasquez_]

“How he baffled me! Now I have learned as much of his secret as a man
can learn; rather twenty-five Velasquez than one Moro. This is the last,
if I live to finish it!”

I told Don Carlos about the King of Portugal. “He always comes to the
Prado when he is in Madrid,” he said. “He is a fair painter himself, for
a king. There is a portrait of his worth seeing in the Museum of Modern
Arts.”

“I think he once complimented thee on a copy thou wast making?” said Don
Luis.

“Perhaps he did,” growled Don Carlos. He smoothed out his towsled hair
and went back, grumbling still, though less violently, to his work.
Somehow the energy of despair had become the energy of courage; little
Don Luis the Valencian with the pink in his mouth had turned the water
of drudgery to the wine of work!

Madrid was perpetually _en fête_ during the visit of the King and Queen
of Portugal. We had visions of them flitting by like figures in a
panorama, on their way to the bull-fight, driving to the gala
performance at the opera, reviewing the troops. The review began with an
open-air mass, the salute of the flag by the new recruits, and the
defile before the two kings, Don Alfonzo and Don Carlos. The artillery
was much applauded, especially the mountain battery, a troop of mules
with cannon on their backs. The cavalry, a fine body of men and horses,
galloped by the grand stand at breakneck speed. One company, all mounted
on white horses, preceded by two lines of buglers, came flashing past
with a splendid dash and brilliancy that pleased Don Carlos, for he
clapped his great hands and cried “Bravo.” After the review the two
kings rode down the Paseo de la Castellana side by side. Don Carlos, an
immense man with a strong likeness to his uncle, Victor Emanuel, was in
uniform; he wore the broad blue ribbon of Charles III, and a row of
other decorations on his coat. He rode a gigantic sorrel horse. He
seemed very popular, for there was a deal of hand clapping and hurrahing
as he passed. The young King rode beside him, looking gallant and
boyish; he had a happy genial smile for everybody. Queen Amelia, a
beautiful woman, built on a generous plan to match Don Carlos, followed
in a _daumont_ with four horses and two postilions. How often I have
remembered the answer of a Spanish diplomat to my question that day:

“Is Don Carlos as popular at home as he is in Madrid?”

“I fear not. He spends too much money. If the things were done here that
go on in Portugal, Spain would be in revolution from one end to the
other.”

Don Luis had more time for Patsy and me in those days than any of our
friends. He was always ready to take us to see sights or studios. One
day we surprised him in his own studio, an eyry at the top of a tall
building. A card pinned to the door by a thumb tack told us where to
knock. A little old lady with a white cap tied under her chin opened the
door. She had a kind face, wrinkled like the skin of a late russet
apple, and eyes like Luis’. She led us along a narrow passage--so low
Patsy was forced to stoop--to a little door where she tapped.

“Is it thou, Mama?” called Luis from inside. “Come in, if thou art
alone.” When he heard Patsy’s voice he ran to let us in. The studio, an
attic with a slanting roof, was filled with piles of canvases stacked
against the wall.

“Ay! _Virgincita!_ don’t sit down on the palette,” cried the old lady,
“nor on that sofa; this chair is quite safe!”

On an easel stood the picture Luis had been working on, a palace
interior. There were flowers, jewels, light, warmth, and atmosphere in
the pictured room, above all there was luxury; that was the thing most
insisted upon.

“This is the papa, and this is the mama.” Don Luis’ mama in her cotton
cap hung over the picture as she described it. “How it is painted, this
lace! And the jewels, they shine as if they were real; is it not true?”

When we had admired all the pictures Don Luis would show us, they were
not many, he was afraid of boring us, Patsy reminded him of his promise
to take us to the Rastro.

“Go thou with them now,” said mama. “He has not been out to-day; he
needs the air.” She pushed him from the studio.

“If thou wilt promise not to dust”----

“_Ojala!_ what a son I have! I promise, if thou wilt go, nothing shall
be touched. I swear thou shalt find the studio as thou dost leave it.”

The Rastro is a vast rag fair, a city within a city, where the poor of
Madrid who cannot afford to buy at first hand may buy whatever they need
at second hand.

“We will go first to Las Grandes Americas,” said Don Luis, leading the
way into an enormous enclosure surrounded by high brick walls. “This is
the quarter of the building materials. Here you can buy doors and
windows, girders, ceiling beams, stairs, everything necessary to build a
house. Across the way are fittings, fireplaces, stoves, gas fixtures,
plumbing. Here you can furnish your house, your studio, even your
church!”

If we had been bent on picking up antiquities, we might have found some
nice things in the quarter where the refuse of the churches is
gathered. There was a Madonna dressed in a fine silk robe, standing in a
little shrine, a cherub’s head in carved wood, a gilded ciborium, a
carved bas-relief of Santa Justa and Santa Rufina, the patrons of
Seville.

It was a sharp, clear day, we stopped to warm our hands at a fire of
fagots kindled on the bare ground in the middle of an old book stall. A
pale, near-sighted priest, on the other side of the fire, stood first on
one leg then on the other, drawing up one foot at a time under his gown
for warmth. He had his long nose between the leaves of a parchment book,
and looked absurdly like a learned crane as he shifted from foot to
foot.

The firelight brought out now one name, now another, as the flames
flickered and the light played along the backs of the old books. On a
sudden the immortal name Don Quixote leapt from the shadow in letters of
gold. You can always pick up the best books cheap because, like bread,
they are among the necessaries of life.

“Bayard Taylor’s Voyage to Japan! I never knew he went to Japan. It
looks so lonely among all these Spanish books, I must rescue it!” said
Patsy. Don Luis bought him the volume for three _perros chicos_.

“Here’s your Spanish and English dictionary,” said Patsy, who has the
scent of a ferret for old books. “How much for the dictionary?” The
dealer, a lean, dyspeptic man in black, who looked like his kind the
world over,--the old bookman is a type apart,--sold us the dictionary, a
large, clean and most precious book, for four pesetas. A shabby
photograph album stood on the shelf next the dictionary. As Patsy opened
it, a photograph fell from the torn leaves. Don Luis picked it up.

“_Pobrecita!_” he showed the faded photograph of a young girl in the
dress of thirty years ago. He turned it over and read what was written
on the back.

“_Mi Corazon!_”

“What a lovely face!” said Patsy.

“Too lovely to be sold for old paper!” Don Luis crushed the photograph
in his hand, threw it on the fire, and watched it burn till nothing was
left but blackened cardboard.

In an old print shop, among heaps of dusty engravings, stood a picture
of a Roman model in a _ciociara_ shirt. The canvas had a hole knocked in
it and lacked a frame.

“Manuel’s Rosina!” sighed Don Luis! “Painted the second year we were at
the Spanish Academy in Rome. He died last summer and all his things were
sold for his widow!”

“Come away,” I cried, “it has grown cold!”

On our way from the Rastro to the Tower of Babel we passed through the
Pasajé del Alhambra. Villegas and J. were just leaving the studio, so we
all walked home together. It was the hour at which the old General and
his wife (the couple who always watched for Villegas as he passed their
house on his way to and from his work) usually started for their
afternoon drive. The proud porter stood at the gate in his best uniform,
with all the General’s coats-of-arms and his wife’s woven into the
yellow galloon trimmings. A carriage with two men in livery drove up to
the door. A young woman came out of the house, followed by three flossy
white poodles, their topknots tied up with strawberry and buff,--the
General’s colors.

“We call her the dog governess,” J. explained.

“You are to take the dogs out, Tomaso,” she said; “nobody will drive
to-day. _They_ are both ill; I am going for a walk.”

Tomaso, the coachman looked exactly like the eldest poodle; he glanced
scornfully over his shoulder at the dogs sitting up grandly, with their
dear little paws in air. Their manners showed a martinet’s training. The
governess held up a warning finger.

“Sit up, Prim,” she said. Prim gave a reassuring bark, and the General’s
carriage drove solemnly through the big bronze gates, on the way to the
Park of the Buen Retiro.

“How horrible to have to drive every day!” said Patsy, “as if it was not
enough to have to eat and sleep away so much time. If anything is to be
exercised, rather my body than my horses!”

“_Se sabé!_” Villegas agreed.

“The General was well till he was put on the retired list,” said Don
Luis. “People say he is only ill because he is idle.”

“Moral, don’t let yourself be put on the retired list,” said Patsy.

“What a great, big, beautiful profession is art!” cried Villegas; “a man
is not retired till he goes blind or loses his wits! Titian was at work
on a picture when he died, at ninety-nine. If the pest had not carried
him off, he would have been alive now, is it thus?”

“_Claro!_” Don Luis agreed. “The artist’s is the only calling for a man
of sense and imagination, except, of course,” with a bow to Patsy, “the
writer’s.”

“For us,” said Patsy, “the race-course is never closed. Heat after heat
may be lost, the Great Futurity Stakes always remain open! Don Luis
knows his picture may end up with a hole knocked through it in the
Rastro, but he hopes, in his heart believes, that it will one day hang
in the Prado. And, who knows? a generation or two from now, some
traveller may pick up my book in Las Grandes Americas for three _perros
chicos_!”

XII

CARNIVAL

“To-day is the _fiesta_ of San Antonio the Abbot,” said Pedra, when she
came in to light the fire. “The Señora should go to see the blessing of
the animals at his church.”

Fasts, feasts, everything connected with the Church has far greater
importance in Madrid than in Rome. One gets some idea here of what the
power of the church was in Italy before 1870. Pedra, who was very
devout, never let me forget a saint’s day. It was like living in ancient
Rome, this strict observance of the days of _fest_ and _ne fest_.

“Then this must be your mother’s _fiesta_, her name is Antonina,” I
said.

“No, Señora. There are two San Antonios and two religions; the patron of
my mother is San Antonio of Padua,--see, here is his picture; his
_fiesta_ comes in June.” A photograph of Murillo’s Vision of Saint
Anthony hung on the wall.

“How can you tell the difference between the two?”

[Illustration: DETAIL FROM “MOSES.” _Murillo_]

“But it is so easy! San Antonio the Abbot is an old man with a beard; he
is always represented with a pig; he carries a bell. It is said that
whenever he rings his bell all the animals kneel down. San Antonio of
Padua is young, and has no beard. It is he who grants so many favors. To
him I burned the candle when the Señora lost her brooch; she found it
the day after, she remembers.”

Don Jaime, old pagan, took me to see the blessing of the animals. He
brought me a little image of the saint with a pig following at his
heels, as a dog follows.

The Abbot was very wise, Jaime explained; he knew, good man, that in
case of hunger, pig is better eating than dog. In Madrid people are
rather indifferent to him. All the Antonios the Don knew claim San
Antonio of Padua for patron because he is more aristocratic. Only the
peasants will have the Abbot for their patron, because he takes care of
their animals.

As we drew near the church, we met a great number of horses, mules and
donkeys on their way to be blessed. A white horse with the _paso
castellano_, a beautiful silky mane braided with bright ribbons and a
pretty silk head-stall, was so exactly like the horse the young dealer
from Ronda showed at the Seville fair that I half believed it to be the
same animal. The man who led him wore Andalusian dress, and a carnation
behind the ear. Man and horse picked their way through the crowd of
loafers, women, children and sweetmeat-sellers, to the church. A priest
soon came out followed by an acolyte all in scarlet like an embryo
cardinal, and from the church steps the priest sprinkled the horse with
holy water, the acolyte swung his silver censer, the incense rose in a
blue cloud. From a side window a sacristan passed the young man a bag of
fodder that had been blessed, and with the payment of a little money,
the ceremony was over.

The church was full of kneeling people; the altars were ablaze with
candles. I wished to go in to see the Goya, a picture of the Last
Communion of Saint Jerome.

Don Jaime said I had better see it another time; to-day there were too
many people. There was some small-pox about--not enough to be nervous
over--but to avoid contagion it was well to keep out of the churches. If
there is a desperately sick child in the house, of course one goes
continually from the bedside of the child to the church and prays for
its recovery. The old grandmother, or the little children who can do
nothing to help, can at least spend the morning in the church, out of
harm’s way, praying for it!

At dinner Antonina, a fairy of five who lived next door, brought in a
plate of _rosquitas de San Antonio_, delicious little crisp cakes baked
only this day in all the year. Jaime, who had come in while we were
still at table, ate one of the cakes as a reward for having been to
church.

“In England,” the Don remembered, “they eat hot cross buns on Good
Friday and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday; they have forgotten the
_rosquitas_ of Saint Anthony and the _tortas_ of San José.”

On the nineteenth of March, the _fiesta_ of San José and of all his
namesakes, I asked Pedra if we should have one of the tarts of St.
Joseph for dinner.

“In all Madrid there is no house so poor that the _torta_ of San José
will not be eaten to-day. He is the patron of the church, and as such we
all must venerate him.” It was a busy day for Don José Villegas; a flood
of visitors, cards, letters, telegrams and presents poured through the
Tower of Babel from daylight till midnight. He sat in his study busy
writing notes of congratulation and sending despatches to all the other
Josés of his acquaintance. I looked over the cards; there were the names
of statesmen, artists, poets, singers, musicians and bull-fighters, all
linked together into a sort of fraternity, because they bore in common
the name of good Saint Joseph.

In almost every circumstance of life or death, the Church plays a
leading part. The wife of a friend of Don Jaime died while we were in
Madrid, and the Don arranged that I should see the funeral procession
and one of the many services. The cortége was headed by four men dressed
in white broadcloth short clothes and Louis-Seize coats, white wigs,
silk stockings and three cornered hats; each carried a long white staff.
The hearse was a gorgeous white affair, drawn by four white horses with
sweeping ostrich plumes. It was preceded and followed by a large company