uares.

Rafael felt a slackening of his powers of endurance, as if an
irresistible languor were stealing over him. The sweet smile of Nature
peering at him through the transoms of that gloomy, parliamentary tomb
had taken him back to his orange-orchards, and to his Valencian meadows
covered with flowers. He felt a curious impulse to finish his speech in
a few hasty words, grab his hat and flee, losing himself out among the
groves of the Royal Gardens. With that sun and those flowers outside,
what was he doing in that hole, talking of things that did not concern
him in the least?... But he successfully passed this fleeting crisis. He
ceased rummaging among the bundles of documents piled up on the bench,
stopped thumbing papers so as to hide his perturbation, and waving the
first sheet that came to his hand, he went on.

The intention of the gentleman in opposing this appropriation was not
hidden from him. On this matter he had his own, his private and personal
ideas. "I understand that _su senoria_, in here proposing retrenchment,
is really seeking to combat religious institutions, of which he is a
declared enemy."

And as he reached this point, Rafael dashed wildly into the fray. He was
treading firm and familiar ground. All this part of the speech he had
prepared, paragraph by paragraph: a defense of Catholicism, an apology
_pro fide_, so intimately bound up with the history of Spain. He could
now use impassioned outbursts and tremors of lyric enthusiasm, as if he
were preaching a new crusade.

On the Opposition benches he caught the ironic glitter of a pair of
spectacles, the convulsions of a white chin quivering over two folded
arms, as if a kindly, indulgent smile had greeted his parade of so many
musty and faded commonplaces. But Rafael was not to be intimidated. He
had gotten away with an hour almost! Forward, to "Section Two" of the
outline, the part about the great national and Christian epic! And he
began to reel off visions of the cave of Covadonga; the fantastic tree
of the Reconquest "where the warrior hung up his sword, the poet his
harp," and so on and so on, for everybody hung up something there; seven
centuries of wars for the cross, a rather long time, believe me,
gentlemen, during which Saracen impiety was expelled from Spanish soil!
Then came the great triumphs of Catholic unity. Spain mistress of almost
the whole world, the sun never allowed to set on Spanish domains; the
caravels of Columbus bea