for you; the censer
swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and
mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as
much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted
hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children
of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that
would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how,
and when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from
picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the
unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I,
ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I
call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides
in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil
dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for
us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time
they tired me, and I denied them.

Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the
cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it
might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great
in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic
firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred
painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain,
abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the
Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral
has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero,
King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and
of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life,
if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's
body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will
tell you, "the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors"
outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far
more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose
effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at
Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite
portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and
witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is
destined to endure