Between three and four in the morning, as the first pale streaks of coming dawn glimmered beyond the stony peaks of the Guadarramas, Philip turned to Fernando de Toledo, who was at his bedside, and whispered, “Give it to me; it is time now”; and as he took the sacred taper, his face was all irradiated with smiles. His truckle bed almost overlooked the high altar of the cathedral, the building of which had been his pride, and already the shrill voices of the choristers far below were heard singing the early mass which he had endowed long ago for his own spiritual welfare. With this sound in his ears and prayers upon his lips, his last moments ebbed away. When those around him thought that all was over and had fallen to weeping, he suddenly opened his eyes again and fixed them immovably on the crucifix. He shut them no more, and as they glazed into awful stoniness he gave three little gasps, and Philip the Prudent had passed beyond. He died gripping the poor crucifix which still rests upon his breast, and he was buried inclosed in the coffin he had had made from the timbers of the _Cinco Chagas_, one of the great galleons that had fought the heretics. In the awful jasper charnel-house at the Escorial, which will ever be the most fitting monument of his hard and joyless life, his body has rested through three centuries of detraction and misunderstanding. Through all the tribulations and calamities that have afflicted his country, the affectionate regard in which Spaniards bear the memory of Philip the Prudent has never waned. His father was an infinitely greater man, but he has no such place in the hearts of his countrymen, for Philip was a true Spaniard to the core, a faithful concentration of the qualities, good and evil, of the nation he loved. If Spaniards were narrow and rigid in their religious views, it was the natural result of centuries of struggle, foot to foot with the infidel; if they were regardless of human suffering in the furtherance of their objects, it was because they lavishly and eagerly gave up their own lives for the same ends, and oriental fatalism had been grafted upon Gothic stubbornness in their national character. But they, like their king, were patient, faithful, dutiful, and religious.