But as soon as we arrived at the Spanish port of Santander I forgot everything in the excitement of a reception that amounted to a carnival. With a staff of officers and dignitaries in uniform, and a troop of cavalry as escort, we were driven in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, through streets of which I could not see the fronts of the houses--they were so covered with the reds and yellows of flags and bunting that were dazzling in the vivid sunlight of Spain. There were crowds on the pavement, in the windows, on the balconies, and even on the house-tops; and they pelted us gaily with flowers tied in nosegays with weighted stems so that they might be accurately thrown. They threw at us doves with their feet tied to long strings, so that they could flutter but not escape. We warded off the flowers with our parasols, and standing up in the carriage I caught at the doves, while my mother, who feared nothing in the world, kept crying out, in a nervous terror, that she would faint if one of the birds touched her with its flutterings. She had the sort of horror of them flying that one has of bats. And this excited me. And the more excited I became, the more the crowd laughed and cheered and pelted us. If Spain were going to be all like that, I should be happy. It seemed impossible that these could be the same people who had driven my mother away with hisses. The realisation that they were truly the same made it seem, for the moment, that we were all playing a part in a spectacle without sincerity. The thought worried me as it passed. We were being driven to the cathedral of Santander, where a Mass was to be celebrated and the _Te Deum_ sung in thanksgiving for our return; and there, at the church door, the bishop in his robes waited for us under a canopy borne on poles by four young priests--the sort of canopy that he walks under in processions of the _Corpus Christi_, when he carries the Host through the streets. My mother, my two sisters, and I were taken under this canopy with him, as if we were something sacred; and we were solemnly escorted, by priests and acolytes, with music and singing and candles and incense, up the aisle to the sanctuary, where four throne-like chairs had been prepared for us before the altar. As I watched the priests and the people, I wondered whether they were sincere in this appearance of accepting us as sanctified by some sort of divine right.