f his spirit. But it had to be. He'll
still hear the blackbirds of the familiar garden. 'After all,' says
Cossio, 'I don't think he'll be sorry to spend a little while with
Don Julian....'

"Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the earth with thyme;
on the coffin they have thrown roses, narcissus, violets. There
comes, lost, an aroma of last evening, a bit of the bedroom from
which they took so much away....

"Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full of wind drag
frozen shadows across us, and through them flying low, black
grackles. In the distance Guadarrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts
crystals of cubed white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second
in the sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish, then
lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies away....

"Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and forgetfulness....
Silence. In the silence, the voice of a child walking through the
fields, the sound of a sob hidden among the tombstones, the wind,
the broad wind of these days....

"I've seen occasionally a fire put out with earth. Innumerable
little tongues spurted from every side. A pupil of his who was a
mason made for this extinguished fire its palace of mud on a piece
of earth two friends kept free. He has at the head a euonymus,
young and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts with
coming spring, an acacia...."

Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas, are scattered sparsely,
tight round heads of blue green, over hills that in summer are yellow
like the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo was one of Don
Francisco's favorite walks, out past the jail, where over the gate is
written an echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity the
criminal," past the palace of Moncloa with its stately abandoned
gardens, and out along the Manzanares by a road through the royal
domain where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs of "Beware the
mantraps," then up a low hill from which one sees the Sierra Guadarrama
piled up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-peaks above long
blue foothills and all the foreground rolling land full of clumps of
encinas, and at last into the little village with its barracks and its
dilapidated convent and its planetrees in front of the mansion Charles
V built. It was under an encina that I sat all one long morning reading
up in reviews and te