In Spain these functionaries look
their office more solemnly even than in England and affect you as
peculiarly correct and eighteenth-century. But apart from their looks
the occasion seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people bore
flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and within the cemetery
they were furbishing up the monuments with every appliance according
to the material, scrubbing the marble, whitewashing the stucco, and
repainting the galvanized iron. The lanterns were made to match the
monuments and fences architecturally, and the mourners were attaching
them with a gentle satisfaction in their fitness; I suppose they were to
be lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There were men among
the mourners, but most of them were women and children; some were
weeping, like a father leading his two little ones, and an old woman
grieving for her dead with tears. But what prevailed was a community of
quiet resignation, almost to the sort of cheerfulness which bereavement
sometimes knows. The scene was tenderly affecting, but it had a
tremendous touch of tragic setting in the long, straight avenue of black
cypresses which slimly climbed the upward slope from the entrance to the
farther bound of the cemetery. Otherwise there was only the patience of
entire faith in this annually recurring visit of the living to the dead:
the fixed belief that these should rise from the places where they lay.
and they who survived them for yet a little more of time should join
them from whatever end of the earth in the morning of the Last Day.

All along I have been shirking what any right-minded traveler would feel
almost his duty, but I now own that there is a museum in Seville,
the Museo Provincial, which was of course once a convent and is now a
gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos in it, not to
speak of the best Zurburans. I will not speak at all of those pictures,
because I could in no wise say what they were, or were like, and because
I would not have the reader come to them with any opinions of mine which
he might bring away with him in the belief that they were his own. Let
him not fail to go to the museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond
calculation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go
to the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six
Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the incomparable
"Vision of St. Anthony" in the cathedra