So depressing is the effect of the Escorial's gloom and its memories, that when you issue at last from its massive doors, the trim and terraced gardens seem gay and heartsome, and the bleak wild scene is full of comfort. For here at least there is light and air and boundless space. You have emerged from the twilight of the past into the present day. The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne. By this light Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours to Madrid,--to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain will be brought to life. Already the signs are full of promise. The ancient barriers of superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution. So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva, "God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the proclamation of infallibility. They announced that his holiness was now