LITTLE Don Luis the Valencian took the pink from his mouth, when he met Villegas coming up the steps of the Prado Museum. “I was going away,” he said, “but I will turn back with you. Anything for an excuse not to go to work!”

“Work!” Villegas fairly snorted! “You call painting work, when it is the only thing you like to do? Caramba! There are some things in this world hard to understand!” Villegas was disappointed. He had waited an hour at the studio for Luz, who never came for her sitting; this was quite natural the day after the court ball.

The head porter met us at the door; any of the famous painters whose pictures hang in the room of the great portraits might have been glad to have him for a sitter. He was a handsome man of the grave Castilian type, with a big, square black beard and skin like alabaster. He wore a broadcloth overcoat down to his heels and a gold laced cap.

“These are my friends,” Villegas introduced us. “You will give them any help they may need.”

The porter bowed gravely and we all followed Villegas into the Museum. He had come to make his morning rounds, and little Don Luis offered to be our guide while he looked over his mail.

“I was too discouraged to paint to-day,” said Don Luis, “so I came for help to the great artists, whose work is here. They seem to hold out their hands to me, and say: ‘we have travelled the road you find so hard; we, too, have known discouragement and despair!’ I always go away from the Museum as from the company of my best friends, full of courage and hope.”

“The way I feel, after seeing a play of Shakespeare’s,” murmured Patsy. “Clever work discourages you; great work puts heart into you, makes you feel you can go home and do something as good, that you might even have done that.”

Villegas, who loves the pictures under his care as if they were his children, is not satisfied with the Prado, and is always hoping they may some day have a museum worthy of them.

“The three arts should be united, as they were in Greece,” he said. “Oh, for a building that should be as a perfect casket for the two jewels, painting and sculpture. Other museums may illustrate the history of art better than the Prado, none possesses more masterpieces of painting!”

“He has performed miracles since he became Director,” said Don Luis; “not only in the care and hanging of the pictures, but against the risk of fire. He has put in all the latest fire extinguishing apparatus. He is right, though, we must have a new building, and, it appears to me, he will get it for us!”

The Prado was built for a Natural History Museum, and the light in many rooms, especially on the upper floor, is very bad. Many valuable pictures cannot be shown for want of space, others can hardly be seen for lack of light. In spite of these drawbacks, the Prado is the most delightful Museum I know. It soon became to us, as to Don Luis, a second home. The first impression is of an immense hospitality; there is no entrance fee to pay; the Museum is free to all. Then the guardians are all so kind and, nearly all, so good-looking. The man who takes your umbrella or walking stick treats you with courtesy and respect, not, as in some galleries, as if you were a criminal or a lunatic bent on poking holes in the canvases.... Every museum has its climate or atmosphere; the climate of the Prado is genial and cordial beyond compare.

The first impression we received of the pictures was a great joy that there are so many surprises among them. A few of the Velasquez and the Murillos we knew already, but as a whole the collection is less familiar than any other I have ever seen. The vast majority of the pictures were new to us. No work of art that has become well known through endless copies and reproductions can make the impression these undreamed-of splendors make. As Patsy said, “they hit you hard like love at first sight!”

Last, but not least, the Prado is comfortable! It has wood floors, and is properly warmed. You can spend a morning there without that fear of catching cold that haunts you in the chill marble-paved galleries of Italy.

In the long hall of the Spanish School, Villegas joined us. We were looking at a portrait of Marianna of Austria, the second wife of Philip IV.

“This is a copy of the Velasquez made by his son-in-law, Maza,” said Don JosÉ. “It formerly passed as a replica by Velasquez himself.”

“And how do you know now that it is not?” asked Patsy.

“You shall see.” Don JosÉ called an attendant, and ordered that the copy be carried into the

Velasquez room and placed beside the great original.

“Observe that it lacks the extraordinary silvery tone peculiar to Velasquez and, besides, is too accurate a copy! Velasquez would never have had patience to copy mere accidents of brush-marks, or kinks in the folds of the dress, if he had been copying one of his own pictures. He would preserve the tone, the spirit, the pose of the original, but he would not go seeking to make the same strokes with his brush. The very mechanical accuracy helps to prove this a copy made by a faithful pupil; thus it is!”

The sixty-seven Velasquez pictures are all together in one room. They are admirably hung, in the chronological order they were painted, so that you can follow the painter’s work from the beginning to the end. The impression produced is of a wonderful living autobiography. Every picture is a page on which you may read some momentous event in the artist’s life. You trace his development from the Adoration of the Kings, the earliest picture, to St. Anthony the Abbot visiting St. Paul, perhaps the latest. It is an autobiography that cannot be read at a glance. In that first visit, made in the company of artists to whom the Velasquez room is holy as Mecca to the Mahommedan, I was introduced to the genius who, for the next six months, I was to study and try to understand.

“Why did Velasquez paint so many pictures of fools, dwarfs and gabaloonzy men?” Patsy asked. We were looking at the portrait of El Primo, the dwarf, holding in his tiny hands a big book, looking out from under his slouch hat and long feather with the humpback’s sharp, uncanny eyes.

“Because he could always get one of them to sit for him when the royal sitters disappointed him,” sighed Villegas; “they had more time than the courtiers, and were perhaps the most vigorous and characteristic subjects for painting of all the people he lived among.”

We passed on to the idiot Child of Vallecas. The poor, vacant face seems to flicker at you from the canvas, the weak, wasted hands with the pack of cards never took hold of anything, not even life itself, save with a faltering grasp. At first, when you begin to study Velasquez, you feel it monstrous that his genius should have been wasted on such ridiculous deformities; in the end you accept them all, for the sake of the genius that has immortalized them.

“Look at that hand!” said Villegas, as we were standing before the portrait of MontaÑez, the sculptor. “How it is painted! With nothing, you may say—zip-zap, two strokes of the brush, and it is a

hand. To create something out of nothing—colossal!”

“That is a good copy,” said J. A canvas, still wet, stood on an easel near the MontaÑez.

“Ah, yes—you may say so. That is made by an American—a certain Hibson; he has talent if you will; he will arrive! notice what I say, that man will go far.”

In Spanish G is pronounced H. The “Hibson,” of whom Villegas foretold great and serious things, the new star on the artistic horizon, in an earlier incarnation, achieved fame as the creator of the Gibson Girl!

“I saw that effect of sky this morning. Velasquez painted that background on a day like this.”

We were standing before the portrait of the Duke de Olivarez, with the bare blue plains of Castile and the snow-capped Guaderrama behind him. You feel the keen, clear air with the bite of the wind from the snow mountains, as you look at that picture of the Duke on his prancing war-horse of the best Arabo-Velasquez breed!

“Look at that dog! It is nothing, painted with nothing, when you look close at it; take two steps backwards, and it is everything.”

It was the dog in the Meninas, one of the details Villegas never failed to look at as he passed.

“That is a canine dog,” said Patsy. “Dogs in pictures almost always have a human expression. These of Velasquez look as dogs must look to each other; it is as if they were painted by one of themselves!”

The Meninas has a separate room to itself. Look at the picture long enough, and the illusion seizes you that you are really looking into a room of the gloomy old palace of the Alcazar, the Court of Philip IV, where Velasquez lived and worked the greater part of his working life. You can walk into that room where he stands at work before a big canvas, look over his shoulder, see the portrait he is painting of the King and Queen; you can even touch him on the arm that supports his palette.

“He paints pictures no longer,” cried little Don Luis the Valencian. “Like a god he creates a world with light and atmosphere, plains and mountains. Into that world he puts kings and queens, buffoons and beggars.”

“And soldiers and horses!” said Villegas, stopping before the “Surrender of Breda,” a great spacious picture with a gray-blue sky, and room enough in it for all the sublimity of victory, the tragedy of defeat. In the background the distant town of Breda still smokes from the besiegers’ shells. In the nearer distance, marching up the hill, is a company of the victorious soldiers armed with the long lances that give the picture its nickname. The men’s faces are grave, they show no exultation to the group of the defeated enemy standing opposite to them. In the foreground Justino de Nassau, the defender of Breda, offers the key of the city to the victorious general Spinola. De Nassau’s knee is slightly bent—it is a stubborn knee and hard to bend—as he holds out the key. Spinola has neither hand free to take it; one holds his baton, the other is laid in what seems almost an embrace, on De Nassau’s shoulder. “Take back your key,” he seems to say. “To-day it was our turn to win; to-morrow it may be yours.”

What was it Grant said to Lee about needing the horses for the spring plowing? There you have the magnanimous spirit of Velasquez’s “Surrender of Breda” in a nutshell.

“My friend,” said Villegas to a stout German artist, who was working away in grim earnest at a copy of the “Lances”; “your color is too hot, remember the cool silver-grays; always try for them!”

“Ach Gott, you have said it!” cried the poor man, squinting from his copy to the original; “why could I not myself before have seen it?” Then he broke into profuse thanks to the Herr Director, who hurried on to escape them.

“I have a plan,” said Villegas, “for a new arrangement of this room.” We had passed into the long gallery of the Spanish School, from which the Velasquez room opens. “Here, opposite this entrance, I shall hang the Titian portrait of Charles V on his war-horse; it is too much sacrificed where it is now. Near this I shall hang some Tintorettos and some Grecos. In this way it will be possible to trace the influence of each of these masters on the other: the influence of Titian on Tintoretto, of Tintoretto on Greco, of Greco on Velasquez.”

The head porter, who had come hurrying up to Villegas, now delivered his message.

“They have telephoned from the Palace that the King of Portugal will be at the Museum in half an hour.”

These sudden entrances of royalty upon the scene added enormously to the interest of our life in Madrid. The marriage of the Infanta, the betrothal and the marriage of the King brought more royal visitors to Madrid that season than usual, and they all came to the Prado. The Museum has for them an especial attraction apart from the artistic interest. The Prado contains portraits of the ancestors of most of the royal personages in Europe, and they are naturally interested in seeing their family portraits. The collection begun by Charles V, and constantly added to by his descendants, is essentially a royal collection. Isabel II generously

gave the pictures to the Spanish nation. How generously that gift is shared with the artists and art lovers of all nations, every visitor to the Prado knows.

Villegas hurried off to prepare for the visit of Don Carlos, the King of Portugal, and little Don Luis, still glad of an excuse not to go back to work, offered to take me to see Don Carlos the Bohemian. We found him in a big barrack of a lumber-room smelling of paint, turpentine and varnish, at the top of the Prado. He was at work on a copy of the disputed portrait of Don John of Austria. He threw down his palette and ran to meet Don Luis, rumpling up his hair with desperate hands.

“Was I mad to undertake it?” he cried. “It is the fourth Antonio Moro I have copied. Not another, not for a million.”

“Not for a million, no; what couldst thou do with it? But for—well, something else—yes, as many as thy grand duke will find room for in his museum!”

“The work that accursed Fleming put into a picture. I tell thee it is brutal to work so hard; he had the patience of a saint!”

“Or a Coello or a Pantoja. It is not a Moro! Thou hast some patience thyself; it is not bad, thy copy!” Don Luis looked critically at it; “a little crude. How many glazes hast thou given it?”

“Only eight.”

“Ah! thou seest? thou wilt get the tone soon. There is nothing wrong with the drawing; the worst of the work is over with that.”

“Blessed be thy mouth!”

Don John, the Conqueror of Lepanto, is a young man standing with the lion of Alcazaba at his side. He wears a shirt of mail the rings as fine as those of a lady’s purse, and every ring is painted. The fringe of the cushion is painted thread by thread, you can almost count the hairs in the moustache.

“How can you know where to begin?” I asked. The copying of this life-sized full length, painted with the detail of a miniature, seemed a desperate undertaking.

“I know how the devil worked! I studied and studied him till I got his secret; ah, there is no one like him; he is a despair! See, first I draw everything in black, white and gray, down to the last detail, then I get my tone with a series of thin glazes. Each one must be quite hard and dry before I give it the next. It takes a lifetime, you may say!”

A delightful copy of the Velasquez portrait of little Prince Baltasar with the gun and the dog stood against the wall. “Thou hast a good thing there,” said Don Luis; “and once Velasquez was hard for thee to copy!”

“How he baffled me! Now I have learned as much of his secret as a man can learn; rather twenty-five Velasquez than one Moro. This is the last, if I live to finish it!”

I told Don Carlos about the King of Portugal. “He always comes to the Prado when he is in Madrid,” he said. “He is a fair painter himself, for a king. There is a portrait of his worth seeing in the Museum of Modern Arts.”

“I think he once complimented thee on a copy thou wast making?” said Don Luis.

“Perhaps he did,” growled Don Carlos. He smoothed out his towsled hair and went back, grumbling still, though less violently, to his work. Somehow the energy of despair had become the energy of courage; little Don Luis the Valencian with the pink in his mouth had turned the water of drudgery to the wine of work!

Madrid was perpetually en fÊte during the visit of the King and Queen of Portugal. We had visions of them flitting by like figures in a panorama, on their way to the bull-fight, driving to the gala performance at the opera, reviewing the troops. The review began with an open-air mass, the salute of the flag by the new recruits, and the defile before the two kings, Don Alfonzo and Don Carlos. The artillery was much applauded, especially the mountain battery, a troop of mules with cannon on their backs. The cavalry, a fine body of men and horses, galloped by the grand stand at breakneck speed. One company, all mounted on white horses, preceded by two lines of buglers, came flashing past with a splendid dash and brilliancy that pleased Don Carlos, for he clapped his great hands and cried “Bravo.” After the review the two kings rode down the Paseo de la Castellana side by side. Don Carlos, an immense man with a strong likeness to his uncle, Victor Emanuel, was in uniform; he wore the broad blue ribbon of Charles III, and a row of other decorations on his coat. He rode a gigantic sorrel horse. He seemed very popular, for there was a deal of hand clapping and hurrahing as he passed. The young King rode beside him, looking gallant and boyish; he had a happy genial smile for everybody. Queen Amelia, a beautiful woman, built on a generous plan to match Don Carlos, followed in a daumont with four horses and two postilions. How often I have remembered the answer of a Spanish diplomat to my question that day:

“Is Don Carlos as popular at home as he is in Madrid?”

“I fear not. He spends too much money. If the things were done here that go on in Portugal, Spain would be in revolution from one end to the other.”

Don Luis had more time for Patsy and me in those days than any of our friends. He was always ready to take us to see sights or studios. One day we surprised him in his own studio, an eyry at the top of a tall building. A card pinned to the door by a thumb tack told us where to knock. A little old lady with a white cap tied under her chin opened the door. She had a kind face, wrinkled like the skin of a late russet apple, and eyes like Luis’. She led us along a narrow passage—so low Patsy was forced to stoop—to a little door where she tapped.

“Is it thou, Mama?” called Luis from inside. “Come in, if thou art alone.” When he heard Patsy’s voice he ran to let us in. The studio, an attic with a slanting roof, was filled with piles of canvases stacked against the wall.

“Ay! Virgincita! don’t sit down on the palette,” cried the old lady, “nor on that sofa; this chair is quite safe!”

On an easel stood the picture Luis had been working on, a palace interior. There were flowers, jewels, light, warmth, and atmosphere in the pictured room, above all there was luxury; that was the thing most insisted upon.

“This is the papa, and this is the mama.” Don Luis’ mama in her cotton cap hung over the picture as she described it. “How it is painted, this lace! And the jewels, they shine as if they were real; is it not true?”

When we had admired all the pictures Don Luis would show us, they were not many, he was afraid of boring us, Patsy reminded him of his promise to take us to the Rastro.

“Go thou with them now,” said mama. “He has not been out to-day; he needs the air.” She pushed him from the studio.

“If thou wilt promise not to dust”——

“Ojala! what a son I have! I promise, if thou wilt go, nothing shall be touched. I swear thou shalt find the studio as thou dost leave it.”

The Rastro is a vast rag fair, a city within a city, where the poor of Madrid who cannot afford to buy at first hand may buy whatever they need at second hand.

“We will go first to Las Grandes Americas,” said Don Luis, leading the way into an enormous enclosure surrounded by high brick walls. “This is the quarter of the building materials. Here you can buy doors and windows, girders, ceiling beams, stairs, everything necessary to build a house. Across the way are fittings, fireplaces, stoves, gas fixtures, plumbing. Here you can furnish your house, your studio, even your church!”

If we had been bent on picking up antiquities, we might have found some nice things in the quarter where the refuse of the churches is gathered. There was a Madonna dressed in a fine silk robe, standing in a little shrine, a cherub’s head in carved wood, a gilded ciborium, a carved bas-relief of Santa Justa and Santa Rufina, the patrons of Seville.

It was a sharp, clear day, we stopped to warm our hands at a fire of fagots kindled on the bare ground in the middle of an old book stall. A pale, near-sighted priest, on the other side of the fire, stood first on one leg then on the other, drawing up one foot at a time under his gown for warmth. He had his long nose between the leaves of a parchment book, and looked absurdly like a learned crane as he shifted from foot to foot.

The firelight brought out now one name, now another, as the flames flickered and the light played along the backs of the old books. On a sudden the immortal name Don Quixote leapt from the shadow in letters of gold. You can always pick up the best books cheap because, like bread, they are among the necessaries of life.

“Bayard Taylor’s Voyage to Japan! I never knew he went to Japan. It looks so lonely among all these Spanish books, I must rescue it!” said Patsy. Don Luis bought him the volume for three perros chicos.

“Here’s your Spanish and English dictionary,” said Patsy, who has the scent of a ferret for old books. “How much for the dictionary?” The dealer, a lean, dyspeptic man in black, who looked like his kind the world over,—the old bookman is a type apart,—sold us the dictionary, a large, clean and most precious book, for four pesetas. A shabby photograph album stood on the shelf next the dictionary. As Patsy opened it, a photograph fell from the torn leaves. Don Luis picked it up.

“Pobrecita!” he showed the faded photograph of a young girl in the dress of thirty years ago. He turned it over and read what was written on the back.

“Mi Corazon!”

“What a lovely face!” said Patsy.

“Too lovely to be sold for old paper!” Don Luis crushed the photograph in his hand, threw it on the fire, and watched it burn till nothing was left but blackened cardboard.

In an old print shop, among heaps of dusty engravings, stood a picture of a Roman model in a ciociara shirt. The canvas had a hole knocked in it and lacked a frame.

“Manuel’s Rosina!” sighed Don Luis! “Painted the second year we were at the Spanish Academy in Rome. He died last summer and all his things were sold for his widow!”

“Come away,” I cried, “it has grown cold!”

On our way from the Rastro to the Tower of Babel we passed through the PasajÉ del Alhambra. Villegas and J. were just leaving the studio, so we all walked home together. It was the hour at which the old General and his wife (the couple who always watched for Villegas as he passed their house on his way to and from his work) usually started for their afternoon drive. The proud porter stood at the gate in his best uniform, with all the General’s coats-of-arms and his wife’s woven into the yellow galloon trimmings. A carriage with two men in livery drove up to the door. A young woman came out of the house, followed by three flossy white poodles, their topknots tied up with strawberry and buff,—the General’s colors.

“We call her the dog governess,” J. explained.

“You are to take the dogs out, Tomaso,” she said; “nobody will drive to-day. They are both ill; I am going for a walk.”

Tomaso, the coachman looked exactly like the eldest poodle; he glanced scornfully over his shoulder at the dogs sitting up grandly, with their dear little paws in air. Their manners showed a martinet’s training. The governess held up a warning finger.

“Sit up, Prim,” she said. Prim gave a reassuring bark, and the General’s carriage drove solemnly through the big bronze gates, on the way to the Park of the Buen Retiro.

“How horrible to have to drive every day!” said Patsy, “as if it was not enough to have to eat and sleep away so much time. If anything is to be exercised, rather my body than my horses!”

“Se sabÉ!” Villegas agreed.

“The General was well till he was put on the retired list,” said Don Luis. “People say he is only ill because he is idle.”

“Moral, don’t let yourself be put on the retired list,” said Patsy.

“What a great, big, beautiful profession is art!” cried Villegas; “a man is not retired till he goes blind or loses his wits! Titian was at work on a picture when he died, at ninety-nine. If the pest had not carried him off, he would have been alive now, is it thus?”

“Claro!” Don Luis agreed. “The artist’s is the only calling for a man of sense and imagination, except, of course,” with a bow to Patsy, “the writer’s.”

“For us,” said Patsy, “the race-course is never closed. Heat after heat may be lost, the Great Futurity Stakes always remain open! Don Luis knows his picture may end up with a hole knocked through it in the Rastro, but he hopes, in his heart believes, that it will one day hang in the Prado. And, who knows? a generation or two from now, some traveller may pick up my book in Las Grandes Americas for three perros chicos!”