over it as would a mother over her son.

If the chapels which surround the building have been omitted on account
of their artistic worthlessness, not the same fate awaits the cloister.

Of a much later date than the cathedral itself, having been constructed
in the sixteenth century, it is a late Gothic monument betraying
Renaissance additions and mixtures; consequently it is entirely out of
place and time here, and does not harmonize with the cathedral. Examined
as a detached edifice, it impresses favourably as regards the height and
length of the galleries, which show it to be one of the largest
cloisters in Spain.

The cathedral's crypt is one of its most peculiar features, and
certainly well worth examining better than has been heretofore done. It
is reached by a small door behind the high altar (evidently used when
the saint's coffin was placed on grand occasions on the altar-table) or
by a subterranean gallery leading down from the Portico de la Gloria, a
gallery as rich in sculptural decorations as the vestibule itself.

The popular belief in Galicia is that in this crypt the cathedral
reflects itself, towers and all, as it would in the limpid surface of a
lake. Hardly; and yet the crypt is a nude copy of the ground floor
above, with the corresponding naves and aisles and apsidal chapels. The
height of the crypt is surprising, the architectural construction is
pure Romanesque,--more so than that of the building itself,--and just
beneath the high altar the shrine of St. James is situated where it was
found in the ninth century.

II

CORUNNA

Corunna, seated on her beautiful bay, the waters of which are ever
warmed by the Gulf Stream, gazes out westwards across the turbulent
waves of the ocean as she has done for nearly two thousand years.

Brigandtia was her first known name, a centre of the Celtic druid
religion. The inhabitants of the town, it is to-day believed,
communicated by sea with their brethren in Ireland long before the
coming of the Phoenicians and Greeks who established a trading post
and a tin factory, and built the Tower of Hercules.

The Roman conquest saved Brigandtium from being great before her time.
For the Latin people were miserable sailors, and gazed with awe into the
waves of the Atlantic. For them Brigandtia was the last spot in the
world, a dangerous spot, to be shunned. So they left her seated on her
beautiful bay beside the Torre de Hercules, and made Lugo their capital