Our young guide took the image down for us to look
at, and showed its shepherd's dress with peculiar satisfaction; and then
he left it on the ground while he went to show us something else. When
we came back we found two small boys playing with the Child, putting its
hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them,
not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will
agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident
irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and
He were all of one family and they were at home with Him there.
Rather suddenly, after we left the church, by way of one of those
unexpectedly expanding lanes, we found ourselves on the shore of the
purple sea where the Moors first triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred
years before, and five centuries later the Spaniards heat them back from
their attempt to reconquer the city. There were barracks, empty of the
Spanish soldiers gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their
own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which Alfonso Perez de
Guzman held against them in 1292, and made the scene of one of those
acts of self-devotion which the heart of this time has scarcely strength
for.
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