You Are Mistaken; It Is Another.

. .

. You ask the guide where the cloister is and he replies, 'This is it,' and you walk on for half an hour. You see the light of another world: you have never seen just such a light; is it the reflection from the stone, or does it come from the moon? No, it is daylight, but sadder than darkness. As you go on from corridor to corridor, from court to court, you look ahead with misgivings, expecting to see suddenly, as you turn a corner, a row of skeleton monks with hoods over their eyes and crosses in their hands; you think of Philip II. . . . You remember all that you have read about him, of his terrors and the Inquisition; and everything becomes clear to your mind's eye with a sudden light; for the first time you understand it all; the Escorial is Philip II. ... He is still there alive and terrible, with the image of his dreadful God. . . . Even now, after so long a time, on rainy days, when I am feeling sad, I think of the Escorial, and then look at the walls of my room and congratulate myself. ... I see again the courtyards of the Escorial. ... I dream of wandering through the corridors alone in the dark, followed by the ghost of an old friar, crying and pounding at all the doors without finding a way of escape."

I am of another race both from the Frenchman and the Italian, and I cannot pretend to their experiences, their inferences, and their conclusions; but I am not going to leave the Escorial to the reader without trying to make him feel that I too was terribly impressed by it. To be sure, I had some light moments in it, because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly by our guide.

Yet I will not say but I was glad to get out of the Escorial alive; and that I welcomed even the sulkiness of the landlord of the hotel where our guide took us for lunch. To this day I do not know why that landlord should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but I paid his price without murmuring; and still at parting he could scarcely restrain his rage; the Escorial might have entered into his soul. On the way to his hotel the street was empty, but the house bubbled over with children who gaped giggling at his guests from the kitchen door, and were then apparently silenced with food, behind it.

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