ndid and famous frontals of the high altar. There were special
ones for each festival; that for St. John's Day was brightly coloured
with verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat
little angels were caressing with their chubby hands. The most
ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with
blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking.

The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of
stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece--all the past of
a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its
embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures
of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the
episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the
glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before
printing had been able to do so.

Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with
walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral. During the first few
days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear
the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of
travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a
little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the
same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured
Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional
admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with
rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to
the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the
Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more
revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in
the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the
soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity,
weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of
food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop
of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her
machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room
said so in a low voice to her uncle. She did all the work of the
house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little
one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes. When the baby woke
from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little