against the icily shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little
girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a phase of the
housekeeping which is the game of little girls the world over. Her sad,
still-faced mother standing near, with an interest in her apparently
renewed by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined me in
watching her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an
imaginary little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe
fire that I dropped a copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled
pensively as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence,
though after reflection I had made my gift a "big dog" instead of a
"small dog," as the Spanish call a ten and a five centimo piece. The
child bent her pretty head shyly on one side, and went on putting more
sticks under her supposititious pot.

I found the little spectacle reward enough in itself and in a sort
compensation for our failure to see the exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan
II. and his wife Isabel which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There
are a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so beautiful there
(or in the whole world if the books say true) as this; though we made
what we could of some in the museum, where we saw for the first time in
the recumbent effigies of a husband and wife, with features worn away by
time and incapable of expressing the disappointment, the surprise they
may have felt in the vain effort to warm their feet on the backs of the
little marble angels put there to support them. We made what we could,
too, of the noted Casa de Miranda, the most famous of the palaces in
which the Castilian nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos. There we
satisfied our longing to see a _patio,_ that roofless colonnaded court
which is the most distinctive feature of Spanish domestic architecture,
and more and more distinctively so the farther south you go, till at
Seville you see it in constant prevalence. At Burgos it could never have