s name), a mouldering
relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hondaye, at Irun, at Renteria, and
finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show
marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be
riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old
escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half
the house. It seemed to me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was
the poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this
noble advertisement. But it stood for knightly prowess, and pitiless
Time had taken up the challenge. I found it fine work to rumble through
the narrow single street of Irun and Renteria, between the
strange-colored houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies,
and the heraldic doorways.

San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set down in the
guidebooks as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain. It has of course a
new quarter in the provincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafes, barber
shops, and apartments to let), looking out upon a planted promenade and
a charming bay, locked in fortified heights, with a narrow portal to the
ocean. I walked about for two or three hours, and devoted most of my
attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a great
frowning gate upon the harbor, through which you look along a vista of
gaudy house fronts, balconies, and awnings, surmounted by a narrow strip
of sky. Here the local color was richer, the manners more _naif_. Here
too was a church with a flamboyant Jesuit facade and an interior
redolent of Spanish Catholicism. There was a life-sized effigy of the
Virgin perched upon a table beside the great altar (she appeared to
have been walking abroad in a procession), whom I looked at with extreme
interest. She seemed to me a heroine, a solid Spanish person, as perfect
a reality as Don Quixote or St. Theresa. She was dressed in an
extraordinary splendor of laces, brocades, and jewels, her coiffure and
complexion were of the finest, and she evidently would answer to her
name if you spoke to her. Improving the stateliest title I could think
of, I addressed her as Dona Maria of the Holy Office; whereupon she
looked round the great dusky, perfumed church, to see whether we were
alone, and then she dropped her fringed eyelids and held out her hand to
be kissed. She was the Sentiment of Spanish Catholicism: gloomy, yet
bedizened, emotional as a woman, an