There they were such as
Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant giants
and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till he had spilled
the room half full of their blood. For me this first sight of them was
magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing else had yet, and I never
afterward saw them without a return to those days of my delight in all
Spanish things.

Literature and its associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion,
must always be first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins in
yielding to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence when
now for the second time we came to it. The funeral ceremony of the dean
was still in course, and after listening for a moment to the mighty
orchestral music of it--the deep bass of the priests swelling up with
the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the shrill, sharp trebles of the
choir-boys and pierced with the keen strains of the violins--we left the
cathedral to the solemn old ecclesiastics who sat confronting the bier,
and once more deferred our more detailed and intimate wonder. We went,
in this suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which
invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the town.
We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly court where
a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously, of us, and presently
a cold-faced young priest came and opened the church door. Then we found
the interior of that rank Spanish baroque which escapes somehow the
effeminate effusiveness of the Italian; it does not affect you as
decadent, but as something vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly
authentic, and ripe from a root and not a graft. In its sort, the high
altar, a gigantic triune, with massive twisted columns and swagger
statues of saints and heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive
piety, and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful lift to
the roof.

The nuns came beautifully dressed to hear mass at the grilles giving
into the chapel adjoining the church; the tourist may have his glimpse
of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may have his guess of
their cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues the tradition
of repose which the name of the old garden grounds implies. These lady
nuns must be of patrician lineage and of fortune enough to defray their
expense in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was