They Are The Spoil Of Convents In The Region About,
Suppressed By The Government At Different Times, And Collected Here With
Little Relevancy To Their Original Appeal.
Some are Scriptural subjects
and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials
of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a
quaint reality, an intense personal character.
They are of a fascination
which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is
the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman
soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are
in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with
every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must
be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures
they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no
other race could have produced them, and that in their return to the
Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and
unsurpassably bold.
It might have been the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with
their strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of
doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out of
the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems the nature of
groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked the grocer where we
could find a cab.
The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing
attention to our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called up
from his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was
scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first making him
wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back wonderfully soon to say
the cab would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with
self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded his promptness.
In the mean time we feigned a small need which we satisfied by a
purchase, and then the grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and
made us his guests while his other customers came and went. They came
oftener than they went, for our interest in them did not surpass their
interest in us. We felt that through this we reflected credit upon our
amiable host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread
through the neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people who
did not all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most,
interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle which
the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured its weight in
chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the bottle with oil and
weighed it, and then he gave the peas along with it to his customers.
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