and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish
spirit has yet imagined.

Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full
enjoyment of that "noble terror" which high tragedy alone can
give. Nothing that happens in the solemn story--in which something
significant is almost always happening--is of the supreme effect of
the socialist agitator's death at the hands of the disciples whom he
has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to
expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of
men. His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where
Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has
taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they
will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft. The
inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it
is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of
the book.

W.D. HOWELLS.

* * * * *

THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL

CHAPTER I

The dawn was just rising when Gabriel Luna arrived in front of the
Cathedral, but in the narrow street of Toledo it was still night. The
silvery morning light that had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and
roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento,
bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace,
and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a
sombre erection of the time of Charles V.

Gabriel walked for some time up and down the deserted square, wrapping
himself up to his eyes in the muffler of his cloak, while at intervals
his hollow cough shook him painfully. Without daring to stop walking
on account of the bitter cold, he looked at the great doorway called
"del Perdon," the only part of the church able to present a really
imposing aspect. He recalled other famous cathedrals, isolated,
occupying commanding situations, showing themselves freely in the full
pride of their beauty, and he compared them with this Cathedral
of Toledo, the mother-church of Spain, smothered by the swarm of
poverty-stricken buildings that surrounded it, clinging closely to its
walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond
what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every
side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence,
thought of the deceptiv