offer their stiff and dutiful prayers. Behind it a market-place of the
most primitive kind runs precipitately down to the Street of. Segovia,
at such an angle that you wonder the turnips and carrots can ever be
brought to keep their places on the rocky slope. If you will wander
through the dark alleys and hilly streets of this quarter when twilight
is softening the tall tenement-houses to a softer purpose, and the
doorways are all full of gossiping groups, and here and there in the
little courts you can hear the tinkling of a guitar and the drone of
ballads, and see the idlers lounging by the fountains, and everywhere
against the purple sky the crosses of old convents, while the evening
air is musical with slow chimes from the full-arched belfries, it will
not be hard to imagine you are in the Spain you have read and dreamed
of. And, climbing out of this labyrinth of slums, you pass under the
gloomy gates that lead to the Plaza Mayor. This once magnificent square
is now as squalid and forsaken as the Place Royale of Paris, though it
dates from a period comparatively recent. The mind so instinctively
revolts at the contemplation of those orgies of priestly brutality which
have made the very name of this place redolent with a fragrance of
scorched Christians, that we naturally assign it an immemorial
antiquity. But a glance at the booby face of Philip III. on his
round-bellied charger in the centre of the square will remind us that
this place was built at the same time the Mayflower's passengers were
laying the massive foundations of the great Republic. The Autos-da-Fe,
the plays of Lope de Vega, and the bull-fights went on for many years
with impartial frequency under the approving eyes of royalty, which
occupied a convenient balcony in the Panaderia, that overdressed
building with the two extinguisher towers. Down to a period
disgracefully near us, those balconies were occupied by the dull-eyed,
pendulous-lipped tyrants who have sat on the throne of St. Ferdinand,
while there in the spacious court below the varied sports went