In Spain, where there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the
churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God
their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and
perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests
upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the consolation
that comes with the free air and the sunshine, and the infinite blue
vault, where Nature conspires with revelation to comfort and cherish and
console.
Christmas apparently comes in Spain on no other mission than that
referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The
Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that
precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as
completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans.
Swarms of turkeys are driven in from the surrounding country, and taken
about the streets by their rustic herdsmen, making the roads gay with
their scarlet wattles, and waking rural memories by their vociferous
gobbling. The great market-place of the season is the Plaza Mayor. The
ever-fruitful provinces of the South are laid under contribution, and
the result is a wasteful show of tropical luxuriance that seems most
incongruous under the wintry sky. There are mountains of oranges and
dates, brown hillocks of nuts of every kind, store of every product of
this versatile soil.
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