Spanish Highways and Byways

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l womanhood. She is a precious figure in Spain's sunset revery-a saint beneath a conquering standard, a silken lady in a soldier's tent. Yet this peerless queen, merciful, magnanimous, devout, "the shield of the innocent," carin

f human bones and cinders. This sunshiny Seville, with her parks and patios, her palms and orange groves, a city seemingly fashioned only for love and song, had her army of nearly twoscore thousand martyrs, who, dressed in the hateful San Benitos, yellow coats painted with flames and devils, were burned to death here in our gay Plaza de la Constitución, then known as the Plaza de San Francisco, and in the Quemadero beyond the walls. As one mingles with some outdoor throng, all intent on pageant, dance, or other spectacle, one s

rd a Devon merchantman. The other, Job Hortop, added to his two years of Mexican imprisonment two more years in Seville. Then "they brought us out in procession, every one of us having a candle in his hand, and the coat with S. Andrew's cross on our backs; they brought us up on an high scaffold, that was set up in the place of S. Francis, which is in the chief street of Seville; there they set us down upon benches, every one in his degree, and against us on another scaffold sate all the Judges and the Clergy on their benches.

that we should go to the Galleys, and there to row at the oar's end ten years, and then to be brought back to the Inquisition

, for I served two years above my sentence, I was sent back to the Inquisition House in Seville, and there having put on the coat with S. Andrew's cross, I was sent to the everlasting prison remediless, where

r player, one Will Shakespeare, did Job Hortop, Powder-maker and Gunner, walk quietly, after twenty-three years of martyrdom, into the village of Redcliffe, where he had been

rare copies of the 1602 revision of the Spanish Bible, by Cipriano de Valera, whom the Inquisition could burn only in effigy, since the translator, who had printed his book in Amsterdam, did not return to accompany the Familiars to the Quemadero. Here are old books with horrible woodcuts of the torments, and time-stained manuscripts, several bearing the seal and signatures of the "Catholic Kings," these last so ill written that it is hard to tell the name of Ferdinand from that of Isabella. Among th

r-branching subterranean cells. We slipped into an outer court of the fabrica, where the two gentlemen, effectively aided by a couple of sturdy lads, pried up and flung back a sullen door in the pavement and invited me to grope my darkling way down some twenty crumbling steps, overgrown with a treacherous green mould. There was

t to us in another city of Andalusia. "It's not socially respectable. Spanish Protestants are the

more open-minded and intelligent than most Spaniards we have met, and was so courteous and graceful in his bearing-not to mention the whiteness of his linen-and

can. "And you owned up that he was a Protestant? And their fac

that the best they could say for him was

hat the incident only went to show how unreasonable was the prejudice

stile. Crumbling walls and blackened towers jealously guard the life of ages since, that feudal life of high and low, pride of station, pride of animal prowess, pride of holiness, pride of idleness, pride of ignorance; the life of superstition, of family exclusiveness resulting in intermarriage to the point of insanity; of that fierce local bigotry, peculiarly Spanish, which dreads and hates all foreign intrusion. The streets, devoid of business activity, swarm with vigorous mendicants, who have no better shift, when times grow hard, than to deform the children who are born to them like kittens in their mud-walled hovels. The casino, where half the town smokes half its time away, hums with malicious gossip. The university languidly pursues the studies of Latin, scholastic divinity, Church history, and all that savors of the past. Under the gray vaul

our second afternoon in Spain. We were visiting, in the picturesque fishing-hamlet of Pasajes, a gaunt Basque church, where the old dame who served as caretaker showed us a waxen image of a sleeping girl, said, not without probability, to have been brought from Rome. Beneath the figure is a burial stone, whose inscription would locate it in the Catacombs. When friends of ours were at Pasajes some three years before, the grandam's story

been so open to reproach that even the finger-games and nonsense songs of the little children, learned with their baby lispings, mock priestly immorality. The Church, steward of untold wealth, has endowed many charities, but the fundamental trust of knowledge it has most sluggishly and inadequately dispensed. Santiago de Compostela, for example, is a very nest of religious foundations. Thirty-six Christian fraternities are gathered there, yet we were told on good authority that not one peasant in a hundred of those within hearing of Santiago's fivescore and fourteen holy bells can read and write. In matters of State, the Church has utterly lost the allegiance of the progressive party and, to a large extent, the political confidence of the nation. As Spaniards study the history of their country, they realize more and more that her colossal mistakes and misfortunes have been due in large measure to Jesuit and Dominical policy-to the fath

s becoming gray" after a life of one hundred and ten years. His hair, indeed, is white, and extreme age has written its deforming marks on face and figure, yet he runs up the steepest stairs, reads the f

f for use in the Spanish schools, and proceeded to regale me with extracts from its pages. I looked severely at the little artist, whose eyes were dancing in a demure face, and endeavored to profit by this unexpected course of instruction. The author chuckled much over his sagacity in having arranged the subject-matter of his book in paragraphs and not by question and answer. In the latter case, he explained, the children would learn the answers without reading the questions, a process bound to result in geographical confusion. The l

antiago de Compostela is adored the veritable body of St. James. He cast a quizzical glance at me in reading this, and then laughed himself purple in the face. "One has to say these

, declaring that ladies always had a distaste for useful information. "That old wife of mine" could not abide arithmetic. He digressed into an explanation of the Roman notation, mak

tic twitch to the bell chain looped within. A maid, leaning over the railing of an upper story, would call down the challen

, was a school book, a somewhat haphazard collection of Castilian poems, with brief biographies of the authors represented. Its novel educational feature was the printing of each poem in a different type. The result was a little startling to t

the reading books have to be like that. Bah! But we will not r

tly through page after page of that juvenile school reader; but when, with a pamphlet on spelling an

eron, was funny enough to make his old sides ache. There were modern authors in plenty who must certainly write much better than an out-of-date fellow like that. He had boo

the mirthful tears from his eyes.

read, soon passing into the great argument between Cipriano and Lucifer as to the nature of G

blime! Good, Cipriano, good! Now you have him!

hy I craved this Calderon. He was evidently a religious writer, and women were all religious. It was an amiable feminine weakness, like the aversion t

read it myself, but it is very large, with most beautiful pictures, and it tells these old stories about Lucifer and all t

gements for the morrow. He mis

safe as a convent. That old wife of mine, too, will be sure to be

e, but she found the eccentricities of this visitor so disconcerting that she affected ignorance, and

er crying poverty and telling us, with the tears that came to his old age as easily as the laughter, how the hardships of life had beaten out of him every ambitio

h all "our house," typically Andalusian, with statues and urns of blossoming trees set in the open patios, with Moorish arches and bright-hued tiles, shaded ba

denhood, and, where the stormy sobs shook him from head to foot, the Benjamin of his heart, a clear-eyed young officer who had fallen in the Cuban war. The tears

walled with books. Among these was an encyclop?dia in which, to his frank astonishment, he found an article of fifteen pages on Calderon. The great volume we had come to see lay open on a reading sta

of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart

its close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, a

w who wrote that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to get something for himself, and that is why t

tled into protest. "He is saying tha

nother jest, and, as in gallantry bound, laugh

fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart p

he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties that the text mig

ry well in those old days. And I want to know which of her three suitors Justina

Catholic point of view, trembling for Cipriano and almost choking with agitated joy when Justina, calling in her extremity upon the name of God, put Lucifer to

definition? One might as well try to scoop up the ocean in a cocoanut shell. No! All religions are human fictions. We have come, nobody knows whence or why, into this paltry, foolis

ging over Europe. The very eminence of these heretics sealed their doom. The Inquisition could not miss such shining marks. The Holy Office did its work with abominable thoroughness. Apart from the countless multitudes whom it did to death in dungeon and torture-chamber, it burned more than thirty thousand of the most valuable citizens of Spain and drove forth from the Peninsula some three millions of Jews and Moors. The autos de fe were festivals. Among the wedding pomps for the French bride of Philip II, a girl thirteen years old, was one of these horrible spectacles at Toledo. The holiday fires of Seville and Valladolid drank th

e stripped upon the scaffold of their honorable decorations and clad in the yellow robe of infamy. This nineteenth-century Protestant may be a lawyer or a journalist, but by exception. Ordinarily he is a petty farmer, a small shop-keeper, mechanic, miner, day-laborer, of humble calling and of lowly life. In politics he is almost s

attendance is reckoned at nine thousand, and there are five thousand Spanish children in the Protestant schools. Several centres have been established for the sale of Bibles and Protestant books, and six or seven Protestant periodicals are published and circulated. In answer to the continual Romish taunt that Protestantism

man of

otestant, this poor, plain Protestant of to-day, as obscure as those Galilean fishermen whom the Master called, is h

with you,

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ed Heart, the

our lan

boys rub charcoal over the front of his chapel and stone his schoolroom windows; work is refused him; promotion denied him; his rent is hi