Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/315

 man. He does not mean what he says. He is false.” “But, Carolina,” Mr. Perry would say, “how can you say that? You are hardly acquainted with him.” The answer was:  “I have seen him. I have looked into his eyes. I have heard his voice. I have felt his atmosphere. I know him.” In the same way she would sometimes express her confidence in persons whom we distrusted. I expressed to Mr. Perry my surprise at the positiveness of her utterances. He replied that he had been no less astonished when he had first heard her say such things; that her judgments had at times run directly counter to his, but that, in the end, he had always found her to be absolutely right, and that she certainly possessed a wonderful intuitive knowledge of men. My own experience, as far as it went, was the same. On two or three occasions, when she had observed some strangers who called upon me, she expressed opinions about them which at first greatly startled me, but which afterwards I found to be entirely correct.

Although she had married a Protestant, and was tolerant and liberal in her opinions and sympathies as to heretics and unbelievers, she was very devout. Whenever she met a high prelate of the church on the street, she knelt down and kissed his hand. She wore an amulet around her neck for her protection, and prayed fervently to the Holy Virgin. Although she had read much, and freely imbibed the enlightened opinions of the age, she was very superstitious. Several times she had fallen down in church in a swoon because, as she said, she had seen the ghost of her father standing at the altar. We followed the Court to one of the Queen's summer residences at San Ildefonso, in the Guadarrama Mountains, and one afternoon the Perrys and I promenaded in the palace gardens and entered a dark grotto or little cave, which was one of the ornaments of the place. Suddenly Doña Carolina uttered a scream and ran