Heroic Spain Part 3

What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a n.o.bility of sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable _caballero andante_! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit.

A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life, so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight.

The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted book ever written.

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

At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil.

But the world was then much as it is now; years had pa.s.sed since Lepanto,--he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters.

His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene where the _cura_ burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one, Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses,"

has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known.

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

Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor, and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start, what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo.

A French n.o.ble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told, "He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier and a gentleman."

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

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

OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS

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

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

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

The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later, weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour.

Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory, and through its iron _rejas_ were seen the blurred glimmer of candles, the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca.

The effect was indescribable,--austere, ascetic, yet with a pa.s.sionate glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such unconscious naturalness.

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

We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose effigies held their arms raised in prayer,--only a Spaniard could endure to look even at such a tiring att.i.tude! But the time for loitering was limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North.

The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled--in its literal sense--to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake, and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter.

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

Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely pace--about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route.

From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast, and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of 8,000 feet.

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

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

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

The princ.i.p.ality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed for her a t.i.tle equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne.

The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world knows, the young queen of Spain, Dona Victoria, with the same blonde hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the t.i.tle of these distant mountains.

It is a fitting t.i.tle for the heir to the throne, since this province is the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was va.s.sal to Roman or Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers n.o.bility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the Asturian lady, the duenna of the d.u.c.h.ess, remark to Don Quixote that her husband was _hidalgo como el Rey porque era montanes_?

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

Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries.

Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind us to the n.o.bility of the _Reconquista_.

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

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

Mohammedan civilization in Spain, from decay within, was completely disintegrated by 1275. The caliphs of Granada led the lives of weak voluptuaries, artistic but decadent; no rose-colored romancing can veil their essential decline. Isabella's court, traveling with its university, with the learned Peter Martyr instructing the young n.o.bles in Renaissance lore, so that a son of the Duke of Alva, and a cousin of the King are to be found among the lecturers of Salamanca, presents a n.o.ble contrast. When the _Reconquista_ was achieved, and after three thousand seven hundred battles, the Spaniard was again master in his own land, grievous mistakes were made, until finally, in 1609, in a panic of fear that the corsairs of Africa were uniting with their co-religionists along the Spanish coasts, the Moriscos were expelled. Spain inflicted this blow on herself at an ill moment, since already from the enormous emigration to the New World, her crying need was population. But this act of bad government whereby she threw away over half a million of her inhabitants (always remember, however, far more Moorish blood remained than was lost, for nine centuries of occupation had well infiltered it through the southern provinces) did not drive out the intellectual and moral backbone of the land as we are given to understand. The Moors of Isabella's day were not the liberal-minded, cultivated people they had been under the Ommiade caliphs four centuries earlier, and the persecuted Moriscos of Philip III's time were far lower in standing.

Also it cannot be questioned that Valencia, the province that expelled them, whose rich soil to-day supports a crowded population, quickly filled up, and soon showed with its irrigation the same industry that seemed peculiar to the Moors. It was central Spain, eminently "old Christian," that when its people flocked as adventurers to America, could offer neither fertile soil nor inviting climate to lure new settlers. The quotations usually cited to prove that Valencia was irremediably devastated by the Expulsion are taken from men who wrote within a few years of the disaster; it would be an easy matter, following the same sophistry to quote aspects of our South a generation ago that could make the Civil War appear an irremediable blight.

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

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

This industrial tendency is what we agree in calling progress, and Spain has been censured for her backwardness in entering the world's compet.i.tion, so it is not justifiable to regret the unambitious past.

But who can be consistent in the home of _el ingenioso hidalgo_! From the moment of entering Spain till we left I leaned now to one side, now to the other, glad and proud one day to see her new industries, a model hospital or asylum, and scoffing the next, at a hideous new boulevard that had relieved a congested district. This land of racy types and vigorous humanity may be doomed to have factory chimneys belching smoke, to have lawless mobs of socialists and pitiful slums in cities where now is frugal poverty, where a beggar lives contentedly next door to a prince, because he feels the prince recognizes him as his fellow countryman and fellow Christian: progress and wealth are bought with a price. Oviedo, just entering the compet.i.tion, and fast sweeping away its picturesque past, made me glad to be in time to see something of the old ways of Spain.

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

The Cathedral is perpendicular Gothic of the 14th century. The west facade has a s.p.a.cious portico, whose effect, however, is lessened by the church being set so that you descend to it from the street. On one side of the portico rises the tower, bold and graceful, showing from its base to its open-lace stone turret an easy gradation of styles. This is the tower that runs like an echo through a powerful modern novel set in Oviedo, "La Regenta," by Leopoldo Alas. "_Poema romantica de piedra_,"

he calls it, "_delicado himno de dulces lineas de belleza muda_." Out of the south transept open cloisters that made, the first day of our visit, a charming picture in the sunshine after the weeks of cold rain; the red pendants of the fuschia bushes caught the long-absent warmth with palpable enjoyment. The shafts of the pillars here were oval shaped, not a wholly successful change, as in profile view they appeared unsymmetrical. Out of this south transept also opens the gem of the church, the _Camera Santa_, which has escaped the general renovation as being too closely bound to the historical and religious past of Spain to be tampered with. Alfonso _el Casto_ in 802 built this shrine, raised twenty feet from the church pavement to preserve it from damp. A small room with apostle-figures serving as caryatids leads to the sanctum sanctorum where the famous relics are kept. They were brought here in a Byzantine chest from Toledo when the Moors conquered that city, and probably there are few collections of old jewelers' work equal to them.

Here is kept the cross Pelayo carried as a standard at the battle of Cavadonga more than eleven hundred years before. Few can help feeling in Spain the charm of continuous tradition. Never were her treasures scattered by revolution; that this was Pelayo's very cross is not problematic but a fact a.s.sured by unbroken record.

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

If Oviedo itself is disappointing to those who seek the antiquely picturesque, the countryside that encircles it is doubly lovely. On a bright Sunday morning we walked out a few miles to see the church of Santa Maria de Naranco, built by Ramiro I back in 850. It was a steep scramble up the mountain side, for the road was like a torrent bed.

Peasants on donkeys pa.s.sed, on their way into the town for their day of rest, some with brightly decorated bagpipes groaning out their merriment. To avoid the sea of mud in the high road, we took short-cuts up the hills, following a peasant who, seated sideways on her donkey, balanced on her head a huge loaf of bread. And her bread, round and flattened in the center, was the exact shape of the loaves chiseled, centuries before, in the Bible scenes of Burgos choir-stalls. The old woman smiled and nodded as she smoked her cigarettes, watching us pick our way with difficulty where the tiny hoofs of her a.s.s trod lightly.

What cares a Spanish peasant whether the road is good or bad when he has a sure-footed donkey to carry him!

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

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

On July 25th the scene near these two churches is a striking one. The village of Naranco is emptied of its folk that pious morn, as the peasants, in the same tranquil beauty as in old Greece, lead their garlanded oxen and heifers up to San Miguel. So unchanging are Spain's customs that the festival is paid for out of the spoils taken at the battle of Clavigo (in 846), where tradition says the loved patron of the Peninsula, the Apostle St. James, "_el de Espana_," came to fight in person. We were not so fortunate as to see this feast of Sant Jago, but we stumbled on a beautiful minor scene. As we returned by Santa Maria de Naranco, a group of peasants stood round the priest on the raised porch of the church, the center of interest being a baby three days old. Few women can resist a baptism, that solemn first step in a Christian life, so we drew near. The father was a superb-looking youth of about twenty, in a black velvet jacket; his crisp curly hair, his glow of color, and the proud outline of his features made him fit subject for the artist.

The G.o.dmother, his sister it seemed from the resemblance, was a buxom girl in Sunday finery; the G.o.dfather was a younger brother of fourteen, who awkwardly held the precious burden. The old priest wore the wooden clogs of the people and made a terrible racket with every step. From the porch he led the way into the church, and after pausing half way to read prayers,--a scuffling old s.e.xton held aslant a dripping candle,--they came to the baptismal font in the raised chamber at the west end. The young father went forward to the altar steps to kneel alone, and the G.o.dfather, with great earnestness, gave the responses. Then the _cura_ poured the blessed water on the tiny head, and to prevent cold wiped it gently. The ceremony over, his wooden shoes clattered into the sacristy, the s.e.xton blew out the candle, and the agile G.o.dmother claimed her woman's prerogative and tossed and crooned to the young Christian as she tied ribbons and cap-strings. The two strangers who had witnessed this moving little scene under the primitive carving of the Visigothic church wished to leave a good-luck piece for the small Manuela. But when they put the coin into the hand of the young parent who still knelt before the altar, he returned it with a beautiful, flashing smile. In halting Spanish they explained their good-luck wishes, and in that spirit the gift was accepted.

Seen from Naranco, the red-tiled roofs of Oviedo encircled by far-stretching mountains made a romantic enough scene. Seated on the trunk of a chestnut tree we watched the sun set over the exquisite valley. Immediately round us on the hillside had once stood the city of King Ramiro, obliterated as completely as the earlier Ph[oe]nician and Roman settlements in Spain. The dead city where we sat, the town below, distant from the bustle of the world yet fast approaching it, the glow and sweep of the sunset,--it is at moments such as these that the mind enlarges to a swift comprehension, untranslatable in speech, of the pa.s.sing breath the ages are. The mountains change, the rivers capriciously leave their beds,--especially in Spain, where bridges stand lost in green meadows and are left undisturbed, for does not a proverb say, "Rivers return to forsaken beds after a thousand years?"

And Spain has patience to wait! Whether it was the new-born child, the forgotten city, the up-to-date town below, or just the sun setting over that illimitable expanse of mountains, Santa Maria Naranco gave one an hour of the higher philosophy.

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