gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger
and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several
pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around
them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be
distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could
enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the
_novios_ outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could
help rejoicing with them. In the case of one who stood with her little
figure slanted and her little head tilted, looking up into the charmed
eyes of a tall _rubio,_ the tourist could not help rejoicing with the
young man too.

The day after our day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of
Modern Art through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were
looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for some
of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth seeing,
though we should never have tried for them. The force of the masters
which the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in unbridled
excess: but if I like that force so much, why do I say excess? The new
or newer Spanish art likes an immense canvas, say as large as the side
of a barn, and it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which it
riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There were a dozen of
those mighty dramas which I would have liked to bring away with me if I
had only had a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them
home. There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures,
but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all the
infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was Gisbert's
"Execution of Torrejos and his Companions," who were shot at Malaga in
1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional government. One does not,
if one is as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave this