tian church, held their market. A
fresco adjoining the gate explains by what means. It represents on a
ladder a fiendish-looking Jew who has cut the heart out of a beautiful,
crucified child and is holding the dripping dagger in his hand. This
fresco stirred up the fury of the Christian populace to the point of
burning the Jewish market, houses and shops, which then were annexed by
the Bishop. The fine, two-story Gothic arcade of the cloisters encloses
a sun-splashed garden filled with fragrant flowers. Around the walls of
the lower arcade are a series of very mediocre frescoes. The
architecture itself is not nearly as interesting as that of the
cloisters of Salamanca. It ought particularly to be so in this portion
of the church, for here is the very climate and place for the courtyard
life of the Spaniard.

V

So lies the Cathedral, crumbling in the sunlight of the twentieth
century. Beautiful, but strange and irreconcilable to all that is around
her, she alone, the Mother Church, stands unshaken, lonely and
melancholy, but grand and solemn in the midst of the paltry and tawdry
happenings of to-day. She has served giants, and now sees but a race of
dwarfs; princes have prostrated themselves at her altars, where now only
beggars kneel. Her walls whisper loneliness, desertion, widowed
resignation.

NOTE.--In connection with the remarks on page 160, a Catholic
friend has pointed out how rarely, when Peter has been robbed,
ostensibly to pay Paul, Paul (otherwise the Poor) has derived any
benefit from it. It is willingly conceded that Henry VIII bestowed
much of the wealth derived from the dissolution of the religious
houses on his own favorites, and recent disclosures in France show
as scandalous a diversion of some of the funds similarly obtained.

VI

SEGOVIA

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid

CATHEDRAL OF SEGOVIA]

Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

_Gray._

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in the days of the Iberians, there was
a city and its name was Segovia. It is now so old that all of it, with
the exception of the great heap of masonry which crowns its summit, has
practically crumbled into a mountain of ruins. The pile still stands,
dominating the plain and facing the setting sun, triumphant over time
and decay,--the Cathedral of Saint Mary and Saint Froila. Though Mary