out, costs a little less than $2,000,000 a year; public instruction about the same. The Church, notwithstanding its large private revenues, demands and receives more than twice as much as both departments combined.

Then the army! Spain is a peaceful nation, so far as the outer world is concerned. She has had to fight none but Spaniards, and each of those wars may be attributed directly to some vice in her form of government. With fields to cultivate — fair and rich fields, none richer on this teeming globe with mines to work, mines which would add incalculable wealth to her people-with resources surpassing those of any nation in Europe, one would think that the wisest thing that Alfonso could say to his subjects would be, "Stay at home, plough, sow, reap, dig, search out the mines that were the glory of ancient Tarshish and the envy of Carthage and Rome; make the earth give its fruits and the caverns of the earth their treasures; cover those blooming Andalusian hills with the olive, the orange, the pomegranate, and the vine; bring the corn again to the desolate plains of Estramadura; let Catalonia be another Lancashire; cover these stripped hills with trees, and make my Spain as God created it a fair, blooming, rich, and beautiful land." But, no-the King must have an army and a navy! If there were real war in Europe, calling for Spain to take part, how long could her army withstand the armies of France or Germany? How long could her navy exist under the guns of England? But in this age of blood and iron armies and navies are the fashion, and Spain follows at a full run. For her army she pays in round numbers $23,976,000 per annum, and for her navy about $6,000,000 a year. And yet she cannot pay her debts, and the country complains of poverty, and the richest fields in Europe are abandoned to the woodcock and the rabbit, and she must nurse the pernicious system

of lotteries, to the enervation and degradation of her people.

I am not writing this in any spirit of reproach to Spain. God forbid. There is much to admire in Spain, and opportunities for a glorious future, even more glorious than the past, which was, as we now see it, a false prosperity, flashing and feverish while it lasted. God forbid that an American should reproach any other people for their shortcomings. Until the mote of slavery is well out of his own eye, let him not be too curious about the eyes of his neighbors. But in seeking out the causes of present discontent in Spain, the unsettled state of affairs — ministries living from hand to mouth-a king tolerated, not accepted, uneasiness here, there, and all over the land, we go first to the finances. As sovereigns go, there is no one more attractive or more promising than Alfonso XII. But he is only a boy, a nominal king ruling by the will of one man -Antonio Canovas del Castillo. Why should Spain pay him and his family nearly two millions of dollars a year? · Well, royalty is a sentiment, grateful to Spanish pride, and it ennobles a nation to have one supreme source of majesty and power, and to feel that he came from a long line of ancestors. But why not transfer this sentiment to something less expensive? Why not make a king of gold or silver or bronze, and wind it up like a clock, and carry it around on holy days, as the priests do statues and candles on Easter and Corpus Christi? People are devout enough to kneel to an imaged Virgin. Why should they not in time become loyal enough to uncap to an imaged king? Such an image rules oer Spain and other countries. A king like Charles the Emperor or Philip II., one can comprehend. He was king, lord, master, his own cabinet and Cortes, and all the land was his; likewise the treasure and the lives of those who tilled the land and amassed the

treasure. But those days have gone, and why should the kings not go with them? You can never have in Spain any sovereign but one in name. Why for that name pay $10,000,000 a year? A king of metal, even if silver with a gold crown on the head, would cost less money, would be as loyally accepted by the people, and have as much power in governing Spain as its present sovereign.

Spain is rich in picturesque mendicants- richer even than Ireland, where the beggar is less fitted to the brush of the artist, though graceful enough in his dirt, squalor, and rags. A Spanish beggar whines, rolling out prayers. and ejaculations, the majestic word Dios coming to the front in a superb way. More loathsome creatures than some of them it is scarcely possible to conceive; while any deformity, any ulcer, any chastisement which it has pleased Dios to bestow upon them, is used as a talisman and a trademark, paraded and exhibited until one sickens, as the bleared, palsied, and reeking army of martyrs stand as if on parade. It is worthy of remark that a large number of Spanish mendicants are blind. It is alleged that the reflection of the sun from the plains of the white sard brings on loss of vision. These unfortunate beings crowd round every church door, at the corner of every street, and literally besiege people who ride in carriages. To miss a carriage along the road is to lose a meal-to starve-since it is to the charity of travellers that the beggars owe their ghastly existence-a charity which stands between them and death from hunger.

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CHAPTER XXIV..

A VISIT TO THE ESCURIAL

A DREARY ROAD-HISTORY OF THE PLACE-IN THE ROYAL APARTMENTS-THE LIBRARY-A GLOOMY PLACE-THE COURT OF THE KINGS -THE ESCURIAL CHURCH-THE SANCTUARY OF RELICS - THE TOMB OF THE KINGS-THE GRANDEUR OF THE CHURCH MERCEDES, BRIDE AND QUEEN-THE GRAND, GLOOMY HOME AND GRAVE OF PHILIP II.

A visit to Spain without seeing the Escurial would certainly be incomplete. Regarding it thus, General Grant resolved to pay it a visit. The road from Madrid to the Escurial is somewhat dreary and desolate. It is described as follows: Rocks rise above rocks in broken, fissured masses over a barren, stony plain. Stones, mountains of stones, break and fall in the most fantastic, gloomy shapes. In all directions they rise and sweep and fall, and you seem to be tugging through a world of desolation-a world of silence and death. Rocks, granite rocks, ridge heaped on ridge, corrugated, flowing irregular, stern. Deep fissures show now and then a shapeless shrub, craving the dew and the sunshine, striving to justify its forlorn existence. No life, no sign of life, no beast, or bird, or buzzing insect only the rocks that tumble over the horizononly the rocks and a cold wind that blows from the snowwreathed hills. Suddenly there is a vast gray building, with a high dome and turrets—a prodigious building that frowns upon you, as it were, it is so cold and vast.

There, in its vastness and grandness, its solitude and loneliness, stands the Escurial. It seems, he continues,

to leap out of the desolation and array itself against the range of cruel towering crags which hover over it—a child of the nature which surrounds it, an epitome of the wild, harsh, lonely land through which we have been tugginga gigantic hill, severe, without beauty or majesty, with strength and purpose.

THE MOUNTAINS THROUGH WHICH THE ROAD TO THE ESCURIAL LIES.

The Escurial was built by Philip II., of Spain, and is, indeed, one of the most striking and wonderful monuments of the world. It was originally intended for a convent and a palace, but more especially as a convent. The first stone of the structure was laid on April 23, 1563, and on September 13, 1584, the building was completed. The last stone placed in the building is marked by a cross, and is always pointed out to visitors by their guides. Its subsequent history is thus graphically given. The King came to live here in 1584, as soon as the building was habitable, and here he lived until his death in 1598. The site of the palace is 2,700 feet above the sea-level, and its form is a rectangular parallelogram-seven hundred and