And its hold is firm to-day.  Go into a Romish church, you shall find worshipers at every hour.  Worn housewives, seamed and aged market-women, a chance workingman, an awed and tiptoeing child,—­they are there in their silence.  They kneel, they pray, their eyes are fixed on the altar.  Formalism or not, a sincerity underlies it,—­a belief and obedience absorbed from centuries of environment; implicit and unquestioning, and making for good.

V.

Beyond the cathedral is the broad square or plaza, and the half-alive streets wandering from this are even more Fuenterrabian than the one just past, for they are less well-to-do.  The poorer houses may reveal the traits and traditions of a town far more faithfully than the richer.  The latter can draw their models from a wider field.  The former copy only the local and long-followed pattern.

Here at our right stands the castle.  It is stern in its decrepitude; its very aspect is historic.  It was built by a king of Navarre, Sancho Abarca, known as the Strong, so long ago as the tenth century; the facade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other facade was rebuilt by Charles V. We pass through the entrance-way and across a murky, earthen-floored atrium, and stand in silence in the roofless central hall.

It is at this point that our nascent impressions are brusquely shocked.  Fuenterrabia is not all steeped in dreams of the past.  It has waked for once into the business present as well.  Its proud reserve has been broken.  There is a rift in the lute.  Here by the mossy courtyard, enclosed by historic walls and the spirit of an unworldly past, we are met by a sign-board, with the following English inscription: 

[Illustration:  For Sale]

FOR SALE! 
THIS ROYAL PALACE
AND CASTLE OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.
appli for informations
to
PRIMO FERNANDEZ, FUENTERRABIA.

A preceding traveler saw this sign when here, and quotes it in part in a recent book.[11] It still hangs, as we see it now, two years after his visit, still pathetically but vainly invoking the spirit of a worldly present.

[11] FIELD:  Old Spain and New Spain.

For the lover of day dreams, given to designing his chateaux en Espagne, I seriously recommend this purchase in Fuenterrabia.  The castillo is a real one and the most accessible in Spain, and all its surroundings are gratefully in harmony.  It is presumably a bargain, and one might either hold it for a rise, or turn grandee and live in it.