It Delayed Us Till The
Psychological Moment When The Funeral Of The Dean Was Over, And We Could
Join The Formidable Party Following The Sacristan From Chapel To Chapel
In The Cathedral.
We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in
the Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed by
the indecision of certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the
postal cards for sale there.
By this time we had suffered much from the
wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or a
silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the
beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of the
Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his
shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in
payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us.
Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value
received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew
of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted
wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with its
open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the
procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not going
to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of its
details.
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