The Expanses Of Water Were Bordered By
Wider Spaces Of Grass Which Had Grown During The Rainless Summer, But
Which Were No Doubt Soon To Be Submerged Under The Autumnal Torrent The
River Would Become.
The street which shaped itself to the stream was a
rather modern avenue, leading to a beautiful public garden, with the
statues and fountains proper to a public garden, and densely shaded
against the three infernal months of the Burgos year.
But the houses
were glazed all along their fronts with the sun-traps which we had noted
in the Basque country, and which do not wait for a certain date in the
almanac to do the work of steam-heating. They gave a tempting effect to
the house-fronts, but they could not distract our admiration from the
successive crowds of small boys playing at bull-fighting in the streets
below, and in the walks of the public garden. The population of Burgos
is above thirty-seven thousand and of the inhabitants at least
thirty-six thousand are small boys, as I was convinced by the
computation of the husband and brother of the Chilian ladies which
agreed perfectly with my own hasty conjecture; the rest are small girls.
In fact large families, and large families chiefly of boys, are the rule
in Spain everywhere; and they everywhere know how to play bull-fighting,
to flap any-colored old shawl, or breadth of cloth in the face of the
bull, to avoid his furious charges, and doubtless to deal him his
death-wound, though to this climax I could not bear to follow.
One or two of the bull-fighters offered to leave the national sport and
show us the House of Miranda, but it was the cathedral which was
dominating our desire, as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos
and out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron-gray bulk,
all flattered or fretted by Gothic art, rears itself from the clustering
brown walls and roofs of the city, which it seems to gather into its
mass below while it towers so far above them. We needed no pointing of
the way to it; rather we should have needed instruction for shunning it;
but we chose the way which led through the gate of Santa Maria where in
an arch once part of the city wall, the great Cid, hero above every
other hero of Burgos, sits with half a dozen more or less fabled or
storied worthies of the renowned city. Then with a minute's walk up a
stony sloping little street we were in the beautiful and reverend
presence of one of the most august temples of the Christian faith. The
avenue where the old Castilian nobles once dwelt in their now empty
palaces climbs along the hillside above the cathedral, which on its
lower side seems to elbow off the homes of meaner men, and in front to
push them away beyond a plaza not large enough for it.
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