d. The Coal Kings, the
Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have contrived to
hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in
lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years hence the palaces
upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along Riverside Drive,
not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, may become
but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of the Anthropophagi,
"whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the voters of the Great
Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until "Heaven
released the legions north of the North Pole, and they swooped down and
crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes."

The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly
is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day
as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has
found its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not,"
according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We
have had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to
him who contrives and waits.

Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and
"bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about
Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main
was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off
to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests,
once filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who
shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter
wheezing to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in
the 'States.'"

IV

I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is
unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are
bound to respect him.

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate
because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was
brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a
Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi,
its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The
mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are plunder
from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from the
temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, wh