e ineffaceably in the
consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature
of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from
level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what _is_ the
use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have
refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian,
any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of
trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish
churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest
endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory
of monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful
choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art
or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered
with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two
minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of
the free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish
convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.

The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and
on our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in
appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands;
they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a
husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can
make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are
good. The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the
cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the
stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso
(she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception
long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot
in the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute
inscription:

Quando la Reina del Cielo
Puso los pies en el suelo,
En esta piedra los puso,

or as my English will have it:

When the Queen of Heaven put
Upon the earth her foot,
She put it on this stone

and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger
through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years
of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.

We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by an