ond endurance, and
joined a sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. The group
was composed of poor people who had come for the dole of food daily
distributed from the convent, and better-to-do country-folk who had
brought things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs not openly
declared. But it seemed that it was a saint's day; the monks were having
service in the church solely for their own edification, and they had
shut us sinners out not only by locking the gate, but by taking away the
wire for ringing the bell, and leaving nothing but a knocker of feeble
note with which different members of our indignation meeting vainly
hammered. Our guide assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation,
though he ought to have known that we could not get in on that saint's
day; but it did not avail, and the little group dispersed, led off by
the brown peasant who was willing to share my pleasure in our excursion
as a good joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth as white as the
eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly a hardship; we could
walk about in the sunny if somewhat muddy open, and warm ourselves
against the icily shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little
girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a phase of the
housekeeping which is the game of little girls the world over. Her sad,
still-faced mother standing near, with an interest in her apparently
renewed by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined me
in watching her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an
imaginary little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe
fire that I dropped a copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled
pensively as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence,
though after reflection I had made my gift a "big dog" instead of a
"small dog," as the Spanish call a ten and a five centimo piece. The
child bent her pretty head shyly on one side, and went on putting more
sticks under her supposititious pot.

I found the little spectacle reward enough in itself and in a sort
compensation for our failure to see the exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan
II. and his wife Isabel which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There
are a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so beautiful there
(or in the whole world if the books say true) as this; though we made
what we could of some in the museum, where we saw for the first time in
the recumbent effigies of