Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/310

 to die in Spain, without having seen his native country again—one of the truest and most enthusiastic of Americans sleeping in foreign soil.

The Perry family had rented a house and garden in the outskirts of Madrid, called “La Quinta,” “the country house,” because it was the only place of the kind in the immediate vicinity of the capital city. The quaint old house, which had belonged to the famous Queen Christina, and had been occasionally inhabited by her, was large beyond the needs of the Perrys, and pleased me so much that I took a suitable part of it, containing a spacious salon with ante-chamber, dining-room, library, and several bed-chambers, off their hands, there to establish my own quarters. The agreement was easily made and I was thus fittingly housed. “La Quinta,” was so odd, so “Spanish” a place, that I cannot refrain from describing it. One entered through a wide wrought-iron gate into a large, square enclosure surrounded by a high brick wall, containing some eight or ten acres of ground, covered in large part by unhealthy-looking trees and shrubbery, a small area being cultivated as a vegetable garden. In one corner of the square there stood a little stone pavilion, dark and gloomy, like the corner turret of a fortified mediæval castle, with narrow slits of windows, little wider than embrasures for musketry would have been, permitting an outlook upon a lane outside the brick wall. Through these windows, so I was told, Queen Christina used to observe the wild bulls which were occasionally driven from their corral to the “Plaza de toros”—the amphitheater for the bull-fights. Queen Christina was said to have been a great connoisseur in fighting bulls, and a lover of the sport. In another corner of the enclosure stood the house, a long, two-story building with a projecting wing at one end. One entered the house by a large arched gateway, which would