Another glorious spring day we twisted up the thirty miles of road to Montserrat, the mountain riven in two at the Crucifixion. It was the quaintest sight to one coming from a land of subways and elevators to watch the donkeys laden with packs on their backs of vegetables, eggs, and butter, and to see their owners straggling beside up and down the hills, masters of at least themselves if not of their donkeys. The breeze blew more chill as we ascended the final slope to the huge monastery at the top. Afterwards night fell, and the moon shone over the huge boulders of towering rocks, and the whispering wind swung from mass to mass and echoed back again whence it came. It was an evening of enchantment. On making other sorties into the country I perceived an innate intelligence in the most ignorant peasant. The average one could not tell the names of the simplest plants or flowers, but one look from the eye, one tone of the voice, was comprehended in a flash. Even the gypsy children in the outskirts of Barcelona, with their little dirty feet and tattered clothing, who danced weird dances and flattered strangers for pennies, had a natural brightness beyond belief. But this intelligence was not being directed, and one reason was inherent in the rebellious nature of the Catalan; he would have preferred no system of government at all if that had been possible, for he was restless and tumultuous under restraint. When I saw children leading the blind about the streets day after day, I asked, “Don’t they have to be in school? Isn’t education made compulsory by the Government?” I was laughed at. “If the Government sent our children to school, we would know it was the wrong sort of school.” Parents who could afford it, however, were willing enough to have them go to Ferrer’s schools. Two thirds of the Spanish people had not been able to read or write before his time. The teacher, who worked constantly all the year round, averaged about sixteen dollars a month. “He is hungrier than a schoolmaster” was a household axiom. Since Ferrer’s first school had opened fourteen years previously, some forty-six had begun to operate, and, in addition, most towns of any size had at least one rationalist school which was maintained by the workers and also used Ferrer’s texts. The groundwork was then being laid for the children of yesterday to become the leaders in today’s fight. The pupils I saw at near-by Sabadella, at Granada, and at Seville, were being taught the processes of life from the cell up, and their instructors were really trying to give them a scientific instead of a theological attitude.