The richest, variegated, and most precious marbles, used as freely as though they were common wood, are adorned with gold and silver, strangely in contrast with the severity of the church itself. The altar is reached by a flight of several steps, and on the right, as we stand in front of it, a window opens into a little chamber, which we sought with more interest than any other apartment of this remarkable structure. We went out of the church and into the room. It was scarcely ten feet by six in dimensions; but it was the favorite closet, the study and the bedchamber of the monarch who built the whole. This was all he wanted for himself. It was in sight and hearing of the service at the high altar. At midnight and before daybreak he could rise from his couch, and join in the service of the church. I sat down in the plain old chair, by the table, the same that he used, and put up my feet on the camp-stool that often held his diseased and agonized limbs, and looked down from the little window on the priests and people in the church below. And here in this room death came and called for Philip II. For long months he had suffered anguish not less than that he had inflicted on better men than he. Let us leave it for others to say if like Herod he was smitten for his sins, and destroyed with the same disease. But when he saw that his end was near, at his order his servants bore him on a couch through the palace, and the monastery and the church, that his poor dying eyes might rest once more on all that he had done, and then they brought him back to his lonely, comfortless cell, and left him to die. It was on a September Sabbath morning, in 1598, while listening to the service at this altar, and holding in his hand the same crucifix that fixed the dying eyes of the Emperor his father, that Philip yielded his spirit into the hands of a just as well as merciful God! We left this sad chamber, and descending a flight of steps made of precious stones, the walls lined with beautiful, polished marbles, we stood in a subterranean chapel, a mausoleum, shelves on each of the eight sides, and on each shelf a bronze sarcophagus, and in each coffin a dead king or queen. The name of each occupant is inscribed on the outer shell. One of the queens scratched her name on her coffin with a pair of scissors before she was put in. She could not have well done it after. There is an altar in this dungeon, and here the late queen of Spain, who is very devout in her way, came once a year and had a service at midnight. It adds nothing to the solemnity to have mass here in the night, for at noonday we had to hold candles in our hands to see our way in and out.