“Ah, of course, and so they should. Poor things! Poor things! How dreadful to turn them out like that!” Entering the tiny church, I found that its granite walls were painted, and, worse still, the sculpture of its granite capitals was decked out in glaring colours. To paint stone in this way was a fashion peculiar to the eighteenth century. At one time the Cathedral of Santiago was thus painted over. It is only since 1840 that the colour has been removed; we still see red and white stripes where the blocks of granite are joined. As I was returning to the carriage, some children presented us with some branches covered with cherry-blossom which they had picked from their garden in their wish to please us; they were indignant when we offered them silver in return. Returning to Padron, we lunched at the little inn, and found a salad made of red peppers particularly cool and refreshing after rather a hot drive. Then we went to see the pretty spot on the river-bank where the market is held, and the house where Rosalia Castro died, with its tablet to her memory. Padron seemed to me an ideal place for a poet to live and die in; its beauties are so varied, its outlines so delicate, and the blue haze upon its surrounding hills so romantic. One great charm about this miniature beauty is, that at every few steps, whether you walk or drive, the scene changes; nothing is so big as to appear unchanged when the observer has moved on. In the great valleys of Switzerland and the Tyrol you may walk long distances without getting any perceptible change in the picture, but in Galicia, and especially in places like Padron, the scenery may almost be termed kaleidoscopic--only that the employment of such a word suggests suddenness, and there is nothing sudden here--it is a gradual melting process, where no beauty is so large and coarse as to obstruct another or become monotonous. Macìas, the Poet of True Love, was born near Padron, and Juan Rodriquez was born at Herbon: we have already seen that it was in the monastery there that this _trovador_ chose to end his days. Rodriquez wrote, _El Siervo Libre de Amor_, “The Free Slave of Love.” He flourished in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. He is sometimes called _Rodriquez de la Camara_.[233]