VIII

On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the world outside of Spain or America, we arrived at the entrance of the cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said "some sort of fair was held." Then we perceived that we were present at the preparations for celebrating one of the most affecting events of the Spanish year. This was the visit of kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public cabs, as well as in private carriages, with the dignity and gravity of smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. 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 cathedral. We did not think of those six Murillos when we went to the hospital; we knew nothing of the peculiar beauty and dignity of the church; but we came because we wished to see what the repentance of a man could do for others after a youth spent in wicked riot. The gentle, pensive little Mother who received us carefully said at once that the hospital was not for the sick, but only for the superannuated and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night or an indefinite time in it, according to the pressure of their need; and after showing us the rich little church, she led us through long, clean corridors where old men lay in their white beds or sat beside them eating their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out of ample white bowls. Some of them saluted us, but the others we excused because they were so preoccupied. In a special room set apart for them were what we brutally call tramps, but who doubtless are known in Spain for indigent brethren overtaken on their wayfaring without a lodging for the night. Here they could come for it and cook their supper and breakfast at the large circular fireplace which filled one end of their room. They rose at our entrance and bowed; and how I wish I could have asked them, every one, about their lives!

There was nothing more except the doubt of that dear little Mother when I gave her a silver dollar for her kindness. She seemed surprised and worried, and asked, "Is it for the charity or for me?" What could I do but answer, "Oh, for your Grace," and add another for the charity. She still looked perplexed, but there was no way out of our misunderstanding, if it was one, and we left her with her sweet, troubled face between the white wings of her cap, like angel's wings mounting to it from her shoulders. Then we went to look at the statue of the founder bearing a hapless stranger in his arms in a space of flowers before the hospital, where a gardener kept watch that no visitor should escape without a bunch worth at least a peseta. He had no belief that the peseta could possibly be for the charity, and the poverty of the poor neighborhood was so much relieved by the mere presence of the hospital that it begged of us very little as we passed through.