aga 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 most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling
masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth
going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the
like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to
be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled
top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head
would have had.

VIII

Besides this and those other histories there were energetic portraits
and vigorous landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been
bent so on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have
spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the Peruvian and
Mexican antiquities which we believed must be treasured up in it; and
that we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the custodians a
special peseta to take us out on the balcony and show us exactly how
to get to it. He was so precise and so full in his directions that we
spent the next half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole region
before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it immediately back of the
Modern Museum. Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing
for the things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities
were so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan, Greek,
and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had
seen and overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were
admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the
custodians (which two cents would buy at any turn) we could have found
pleasure in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in
plaster and the Inca jewelry not striking.

Before finding the place we had had the help of two policemen and one
newsboy and a postman in losing ourselves in the Prado where we mostly
sought for it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust into
the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a boy, does not like to say
he does not know where a place is; he is either too proud or too polite
to do it, and he will misdirect you without mercy. But the morning was
bright, and almost warm, and we should have looked forward to weeks of
sunny weather if our experience had not taught us tha