The Argosy — page 54: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Letters from Majorca. 4I is in all other respects not worthy of comparison with the mother church. It is in the florid 14th and 15th century style. We liked the pointed arches and naves of the interior, and were simply charmed with the magnificent tones of the great organ. Service was going on, and the boys’ voices in the distant chancel rose and fell in Gregorian chant. When they ceased the organ swelled out, now softly as a whispered melody, now crashing out in a perfect volume of sound that rolled and reverberated through the aisles and seemed to shake them to their very foundations. I have seldom heard anything finer and more thrilling, and more than ever felt that music is Heaven’s divinest gift to man. Before this, in the morning, we had strolled through the market place, and though it seems rather like descending from the sublime to the ridiculous, I think we enjoyed it as much as anything. Here, far more than in the atmosphere, which to-day was chilly, we realised that we were entering southern latitudes. ‘Though it was Sunday morning, the market was in full activity, the stalls were most pic- turesque. The women asked a franc, and would probably have taken ten sous, for immense bouquets of roses that almost required a wheelbarrow to convey them home. There were stores of tomatoes at a penny a pound, and baskets of strawberries at a shilling, and luscious green figs that were almost given away, whilst everything else seemed in proportion. One woman, whether we would or not, thrust upon us six bunches of the largest, sweetest violets you ever saw, and demanded two sous for them. We almost felt that we were robbing her. I tried to get a box to hold a supply that would have adorned and scented your rooms, but twelve had struck, and at the magic sound all shops close, swift as the ghosts that disappear at cockcrow. So you never had your violets; and here in Palma, amidst perpetual sunshine and eternal summer, and much that is lovely and charming, they have yet to be discovered. We left Bordeaux at 7.15 in the evening, en route for Barce- fona, wondering very much what sort of a night journey lay before us. Luckily we had a carriage to ourselves, and the guard, who paid us special attention, marked our compartment with a white cross. For a moment we felt almost under a ban, cut off from man- kind like the lazarettos of old tenanted by infected mortals, or the doomed houses that were marked during the raging of the plague. But the white cross in our case was as the swan to Lohengrin; a token that we dwelt in the odour of sanctity and were unapproach- able. Outside, the night was still, chilly and mysterious. No brilliant stars, no silvery moon, but heavy clouds and occasional showers. Towns and churches, when we came to them, threw out dark out- lines. Deep silence seemed to reign everywhere except in the stations. COM A) DOOKS (CO) un