"Is your Virgin so very powerful?" we asked of a chorister boy while he drew the cords to part the curtains that screened the jewelled image throned in a recess above the high altar.
"I should rather think she was," answered the little fellow in a glow. "Why, let me tell you! Robbers, the accursed ones, came here on a dark midnight to steal her precious stones. They entered by a window, those sons of wretched mothers, and put up a long ladder against the altar wall. The wickedest of them all, señoras, he climbed the ladder and raised his hand to take Our Lady's crown. And in that instant the great bells overhead began to ring, and all the bells of all Bilbao pealed with them, and the people waked and came running to the rescue of Our Lady, and the robbers were put to death."
Our expression did not quite satisfy his boyish ardor, and he pointed convincingly toward a handsome silver plaque. "And this, too, witnesses Our Lady's power. It was given in memory of the cholera time, when people were dying like flies in all the towns about. But after Our Lady was carried in procession through the streets of Bilbao, not one died here, except a sinful man who would not turn his head to look upon her."
"That is a painting of the procession, the large picture over there on the wall?"
"No, no, señoras. That picture commemorates another of Our Lady's wonderful deeds. The floods were threatening the city, but Our Lady, with many censers and candles, was borne down to the river bank, and she ordered the water to go back, and it obeyed her, and all the town was saved."
We retreated to the cloisters, from which one has a superb view of the valley of the Nervion, for Our Lady of Begoña dwells high upon a hilltop. Only the afternoon before we had been in serene Guernica, a strange contrast to this mining capital of Vizcaya, this bustling, noisy, iron-grimed Bilbao, in which the Basques take such delight. It is not a city to gratify the mere tourist, who expects the people of the lands through which he is pleased to pass to devote themselves to looking picturesque. But even Spain is something more than food for the kodak, and this sooty atmosphere of smelting works and factories, traffic and commerce, means life to Spanish lungs. It is little to my credit that I took more interest in the fact that Bilbao used to supply Shakespeare's cronies with rapiers, under the name of "bilboes," than in statistics regarding those millions of tons of ore which its iron mines are now annually exporting to Great Britain. The many English in Bilbao, miners and artisans, with the influence they shed around them, make the streets rougher and uglier than in purely Spanish towns. On the other hand, they bring a spirit of religious independence, so that it is not strange to find the Spanish Protestants of Bilbao a numerous and vigorous body, counting as a pronounced element in the community.