he
churches, but without the old state or regularity.

Since the death of Alfonso XII., many of the purely Spanish customs of
the Court have been modified or discontinued. Although the late King was
credited with a desire to reduce the civil list, and to adopt more
English customs, he was to some extent in the hands of the
Conservatives, who had been the means of his restoration, and when he
went forth to put an end to the Carlist insurrection and finish the
civil war, which had laid desolate the Northern provinces and ruined
commerce and industry for some seven years, it was at the head of a
personal following of over five hundred people. Nor was the Court much,
if any, less numerous when the Royal Family removed in the summer to the
lovely Palace of St. Ildefonso at La Granja--that castle in the air,
which has no equal in Europe, hanging, as it does, among gardens,
forests, rivers, and lakes, three thousand eight hundred and forty feet
above the level of the sea.

The Queen is Austrian, and she has never gone out of her way to
conciliate the people by making herself really Spanish. This she has
left to the Infanta Isabel, the eldest sister of Alfonso XII. For many
years before the birth of her brother, the Infanta Isabel was Princess
of Asturias, as heiress apparent of the Crown. With the advent of a boy,
she became, of course, only Infanta, losing the rank which she had held
up to this time. Being but a child at the time, she perhaps knew or
cared little for any difference it may have made in her surroundings.
She shared in the flight of the Royal Family to France in 1868, and her
education was completed in Paris. When the whirligig of Spanish politics
called her brother Alfonso, who at the time was a military student at
Sandhurst, to the throne from which his mother had been driven, Princess
Isabel returned with him to Madrid, and was once more installed in the
Palace, above the Manzanares, as Princess of Asturias. This rank
remained hers during the short episode of her brother's marriage to his
cousin Mercedes, and the melancholy death of the girl Queen at the
moment when a direct heir to the throne was expected. Once more, when
the daughter of Alfonso's second wife, the present Queen Regent, was
born, the Infanta Isabel became her title, and she took again the lower
rank.

Nothing in history is more pathetic than this first marriage of Alfonso
XII. and its unhappy termination. The children of Queen Isabel and t