The Supreme Interest Of The Cathedral Is, Of Course, The Royal Chapel,
Where In A Sunken Level Ferdinand And Isabel Lie, With Their Poor Mad
Daughter Joan And Her Idolized Unfaithful Husband Philip The Fair, Whose
Body She Bore About With Her While She Lived.
The picture postal has
these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen,
which falters also from the tremendous _retablo_ of the chapel dense
with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic
Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors.
If the picture postal will not
supply these, or reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which
abound .there and in the sacristy - jewels and vestments and banners and
draperies of the royal camp-altar - there is nothing for the reader but
to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while, and if he cannot
believe in a box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave Columbus
her jewels in merely because he has been shown a reliquary as her
hand-glass, so much the worse for him. He will not then merit the
company of a small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to the
crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and
defiantly pockets the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve
to witness the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel,
where many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes,
preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the mothers of the flock
is pinioned much against her will by a street boy volunteering for the
office, and her head held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure
full at the other end.
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