creation and the passion of Jesus.  Brocade and silk unrolled the magnificence of their textures.  One cape was a garden of flame-coloured carnations, another was a bed of roses and other fantastic flowers with twisted stamens and metallic petals.  The sacristans produced from the deep shelves, as though they were books, the splendid and famous frontals of the high altar.  There were special ones for each festival; that for St. John’s Day was brightly coloured with verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat little angels were caressing with their chubby hands.  The most ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking.

The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece—­all the past of a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before printing had been able to do so.

Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral.  During the first few days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo.  But after a little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the same.  There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h’s of cold and conventional admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown.  Returning to the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more revolting and intolerable.  The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity, weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop of blood.  The little child was dying!  Sagrario, who had left her machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker’s room said so in a low voice to her uncle.  She did all the work of the house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes.  When the baby woke from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little neck, which had become a mere thread; the mother to stifle its feeble moans would press it to her breast, but the child would turn away its mouth guessing the inutility of expending its strength on that rag of flesh from which it could only succeed in extracting the last drop.