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At every turn a church rears its head, and the cheerless spirit of a palace glares with a sadly vacant stare from behind wrought-iron rejas and a complicated stone-carved blazon. Rarely is the door opened; when it is, the passer catches a glimpse of a sun-bathed courtyard, gorgeously alive with light and many flowers.
They must be examined one by one, and they will be admired; the view of the ensemble will puzzle and amaze him, yet it will be wise for him not to criticize harshly the lack of unity of style. Frequently the choir stalls are ogival, the retablo Renaissance, the rejas plateresque, and the general decoration of columns, etc., of the most lavish grotesque.
Soon after most of the ricos and fashionables left the saloon, but some tireless votaries of Terpsichore still lingered until the rosy Aurora peeped through the "rejas" of the Casa de Cabildo. The "Llano Estacado," or "Staked Plain" of the hunters, is one of the most singular formations of the Great American Prairie.
They brought their trade up to the height of a fine art of universal fame; their artistic window rejas, in the houses and palaces of the rich, are the wonder of all art lovers, and so also are the immense rejas or grilles which close off the high altar and the choir from the transept, or the entrance to chapels from the aisles.
Scores of the gilded youth on the way home from "playing the bear" before their favorite rejas join together in bands to howl into the small hours their glee at the kindness of life, the entire stock of street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are snatched awake by an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven, nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of the Hereafter.
"Exactly, what a charming task! I shall have to write my cherubs' names, I suppose, most of them will take a yard of tape apiece. I already recall Paulina Strozynski, Mercedes McGafferty, and Sigismund Braunschweiger." "And I, Maria Virginia de Rejas Perkins, Halfdan Christiansen, and Americo Vespucci Garibaldi."
Probably the most famous use of iron in Spain is in the stupendous "rejas," or chancel screens of wrought iron; but these are nearly all of a late Renaissance style, and hardly come within the scope of this volume. The requirements of Spanish cathedrals, too, for wrought iron screens for all the side chapels, made plenty of work for the iron masters.
The workmanship of these two rejas is of the most sober Spanish classic or plateresque period, and though the black has not as yet been taken off, the silver and gold peep forth here and there, and show what a brilliancy must have radiated from these elegantly decorated bars and cross-bars in the eighteenth century.
In Spain to-day everything is dated from "La Gloriosa," the Revolution of 1868, the "Day of Spanish Liberty," as it well deserves to be called, and there is every reason to look back with pride upon that time; because, after the battle of Alcoléa, when the cry raised in the Puerta del Sol, Viva Prim! was answered by the troops shut up in the Government offices, and the people, swarming up the rejas and the balconies, fraternised with their brothers-in-arms, who had been intended, could they have been trusted by their commanders, to shoot them down, Madrid was for some days wholly in the hands of King Mob, and of King Mob armed.
We passed through the entire length of the town ere we reached the posada; the streets were dark and almost entirely deserted. The posada was a large building, the windows of which were well fenced with rejas, or iron grating: no light gleamed from them, and the silence of death not only seemed to pervade the house, but the street in which it was situated.
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