It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how
dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the
palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist
shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent
afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its plainness, one of the two or
three things worthiest seeing among the two or three hundred things
worth seeing in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after we
returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that everybody went to the
Escorial and that it would be a proud distinction not to go. All the
time we knew we should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen
by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken
inordinately early, and might well have been started a little later.




I


Nothing was out of the common on the way to the station, and our sense
of the ordinary was not relieved when we found ourselves in a car of the
American open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans bent upon
the same errand as ourselves; though I am bound to say that the backs of
the transverse seats rose well toward the roof of the car with a certain
originality.

When we cleared the city streets and houses, we began running out into
the country through suburbs vulgarly gay with small, bright brick
villas, so expressive of commuting that the eye required the vision of