silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the
beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of the
Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his
shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in
payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us.
Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value
received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew
of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted
wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with its
open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the
procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not going
to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of its
details. No literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or
architecture or sculpture to me: the despised postal card is better for
that; and probably throughout these "trivial fond records" I shall be
found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or
unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the
impossibility of remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the
reader's own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the
cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of
the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation, which
I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a