The emperor's first care, after landing, was to send a message to the general of the order of St. Jerome, requiring his attendance at Valladolid, and desiring that no time might be lost in preparing the convent of Yuste for his reception. He himself set forward, as soon as he was able, and was carried sometimes in a horse-litter, sometimes in a chair on men's shoulders, by slow and painful stages to Burgos. Near that ancient city he was met by the constable of Castille, Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, who lodged him for some days in the noble palace of his family, known as the Casa del Cordon, from a massive cord of St. Francis, wrought in stone, with which the architect has adorned and protected the great portal. The little town of Dueñas was the next resting-place, and there its lord, the count of Buendia, did the honors of his feudal castle on the adjacent height rising abruptly from the bare plains of the Arlanzon. At Torquemada, the royal party was received by the bishop of the diocese, Pedro de Gasca, a divine, whose skilful diplomacy, in repressing a formidable rebellion, had saved Peru to Castille, and who had lately been rewarded by the emperor with the mitre of Palencia. But in spite of these demonstrations of respect and gratitude, Charles was made painfully sensible of the change which his own act had wrought in his condition. The barons and the great churchmen, who, a few months before, would have flocked from all parts to do him honor, now appeared in very scanty numbers, or they permitted him to pass unnoticed through the lands and by the homes which they perhaps owed to his bounty. He and his sister Eleanor must have remembered with a sigh the time when he first set foot in Spain, thirty-eight years before, and found the shores of Asturias, and the highways of Castille, thronged with loyal crowds, hastening to tender their homage. In the forgetfulness of the new generation, he may also have been reminded how he himself had treated, with coldness and slighting, the great cardinal Ximenes, who had worn out his declining years in defending and maintaining the prerogatives of the catholic crown. His long and varied experience of men made him incapable of deriving any pleasure from their applause, but not altogether incapable of being pained by their neglect. His pride was hurt at finding himself so quickly forgotten; and he is said to have evinced a bitter sense of the surprise, by the remark, "I might well say that I was naked!" It is probable, therefore, that he declined the honors of a public entry into Valladolid, not merely from a desire to shun the pomps and vanities of state, but also from a secret apprehension that it might prove but a pitiful shadow of former pageants. That the citizens might not be balked of their show, while the emperor entered privately on the 23rd of October, it was agreed that the two queens, his sisters, should make their appearance there in a public manner the next day.