THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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on their knees as it passed, praying for the soul of the good queen. At night, when the escort rested with their sacred charge, in the fields or in some village church, the bier was watched by the villagers who, in devout attitudes, listened to masses for the dead.
Ximenes, when told of her death, said: “ Spain has lost a queen she can not sufficiently mourn. We have known the superiority of her intellect, the goodness of her heart, the purity of her conscience, the sincerity of her piety, her justice toward all the world, her desire to give abundance and tranquillity to her people.” This estimate of her character can be accepted as just. Her errors were those of her education and her century; her virtues were those of a great queen and a great woman. She taught her nobles that they were born to serve not to oppress, and recalled to mind the old law of Castile, “ that a cavalier of noble blood should treat his vassals with love and gentleness.” She taught the world that obedience to law is as necessary for the moral sphere as for the physical, and that liberty is the fruit of a wise government. In her administration she foreshadowed the modern tendency to seek redress for wrong by legal means, and order by perfect social institutions, and by this course she gave an unexpected movement to the march of civilization.
She sleeps beside her husband in a magnificent chapel in the center of Granada. Every year on the anniversary of her burial the bells of twenty-eight churches, which she built in that city on the ruins of Moorish mosques, toll in her memory and recall the work in which she most gloried—the planting of the cross over the crescent of the infidel.