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 a husband and wife, with features worn away by
time and incapable of expressing the disappointment, the surprise they
may have felt in the vain effort to warm their feet on the backs of the
little marble angels put there to support them. We made what we could,
too, of the noted Casa de Miranda, the most famous of the palaces in
which the Castilian nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos. There we
satisfied our longing to see a _patio,_ that roofless colonnaded court
which is the most distinctive feature of Spanish domestic architecture,
and more and more distinctively so the farther south you go, till at
Seville you see it in constant prevalence. At Burgos it could never have
been a great comfort, but in this House of Miranda it must have been a
great glory. The spaces between many of the columns have long been
bricked in, but there is fine carving on the front and the vaulting of
the staircase that climbs up from it in neglected grandeur. So many feet
have trodden its steps that they are worn hollow in the middle, and to
keep from falling you must go up next the wall. The object in going up
at all is to join in the gallery an old melancholy custodian in looking
down into the _patio,_ with his cat making her toilet beside him, and to
give them a fee which they receive with equal calm. Then, when you have
come down the age-worn steps without breaking your neck, you have done
the House of Miranda, and may lend yourself with what emotion you choose
to the fact that this ancient seat of hidalgos has now fallen to the low
industry of preparing pigskins to be wine-skins.
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