m our
failure for that church, men with trains of oxen plowing and showing
against the round red rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the
crimson-hulled steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields;
the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our
return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot
with bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions from my
note-book which each and every one would expand into a chapter or a
small volume under the intensive culture which the reader may well have
come to dread. But I fling them all down here for him to do what he
likes with, and turn to speak at more length of the University, or,
rather the University Church, which I would not have any reader of mine
fail to visit.

X

With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange
peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in the _patio_
play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play
in our own land. While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it
and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait
for the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found
the booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise
of recitation from the windows looking into the _patio_ followed us
up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed
library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities
of some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One,
who seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the
place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long,
for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the
books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty
thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without
examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value
was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to
unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful _retablo_ carved in wood
and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there
are two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are
stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of
impressiveness. Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez
de Ribera and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, an