in his hand, for all men to see. What
sort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his
theory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds?
And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leave
behind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans that
one remembers Francis of Assisi.

And the curious thing about the legend of a personality is that it may
reach the highest fervor without being formulated. It is something by
itself that stands behind anecdotes, death-notices, elegies.

In Madrid at the funeral of another of the great figures of nineteenth
century Spain, Perez Galdos, I stood on the curb beside a large-mouthed
youth with a flattened toadlike face, who was balancing a great
white-metal jar of milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and the
carriages full of flowers had just passed. The street in front of us
was a slow stream of people very silent, their feet shuffling,
shuffling, feet in patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toed
shoes, pointed-toed shoes, _alpargatas_, canvas sandals; people along
the sides seemed unable to resist the suction of it, joined in
unostentatiously to follow if only a few moments the procession of the
legend of Don Benito. The boy with the milk turned to me and said how
lucky it was they were burying Galdos, he'd have an excuse for being
late for the milk. Then suddenly he pulled his cap off and became
enormously excited and began offering cigarettes to everyone round
about. He scratched his head and said in the voice of a Saul stricken
on the road to Damascus: "How many books he must have written, that
gentleman! _!Caspita!_... It makes a fellow sorry when a gentleman like
that dies," and shouldering his pail, his blue tunic fluttering in the
wind, he joined the procession.

Like the milk boy I found myself joining the procession of the legend
of Giner de los Rios. That morning under the encina I closed up the
volumes on the theory of law and the bulletins with their death-notices
and got to my feet and looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo and
thought of the little lithe baldheaded man with a white beard like the
beard in El Greco's portrait of Covarrubias, who had taught a
generation to love the tremendous contours of their country, to climb
mountains and bathe in cold torrents, who was the first, it almost
seems, to feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a lifetime of
courageous unobtrusive wor