ROMANTIC SPAIN:
A RECORD OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES.

BY
JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA,
AUTHOR OF
"LEAVES FROM THE LIFE or A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,"
"AN IRON-BOUND CITY," ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

LONDON:
WARD AND DOWNEY,
12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1887.
[All Rights Reserved.]

TO
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT, ESQ.,
IN TOKEN OF ESTEEM FOR
HIS BOLD AND TRUTHFUL CHARACTER,
AND OF
GLADNESS THAT WE HAVE SO MANY KINDRED SYMPATHIES,
This Book is Enscribed
BY THE WRITER.

PREFACE.

THIS simple recital of personal haps and mishaps in perturbed Spain from the abdication of Amadeus to the entry of Don Carlos, puts forward no claim to the didactic or dogmatic. Its chief aim is to amuse. Of course, if I succeed in conveying knowledge and dispelling illusions—in Tasso's words, if I administer a pill under a coating of jam—I shall be cock-a-hoop with delight. But I warn the reader I am not an unprejudiced witness. I am passionately fond of Spain and her people. Although years have elapsed since the events dealt with occurred, I fancy the narrative will not be hackneyed, for in Spain public life repeats itself with a fidelity which is never monotonous. I do not pretend to cast the horoscope of the poor little monarch who is in the nurse's arms, but Heaven guard him! 'Twere better for him that he had been born in a Highland shieling.

Should there be much individualism in these pages, it is intentional, and to be ascribed to the instance of friends. They said, "Bother history; give us plenty of your own experiences." It is to be hoped they have not led me astray by their well-meant advice.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

ROMANTIC SPAIN.

CHAPTER I.

Which, being non-essential, treats partly of Spain, but principally of the Writer.

THE sun was shining with a Spanish lustre—a lustre as of glowing sarcasm—seeing that on that very day a Fire-Worshipper, Dadabhai Naoroji, was over-shadowed in his attempt to become a Member of Parliament for Holborn. The sun, I repeat, was shining with a Spanish lustre while the inquisition was being held. The tribunal was in the open air, under the mid plane-tree in Camberwell Green, the trimmest public garden in London. Conscience was the inquisitor, and the charge I had brought against myself was that of harbouring a vagrom spirit. I should have been born in a gipsy caravan or under a Bedaween's tent. Nature intended me to have become a traveller, a showman, or a knight-errant; and had Nature been properly seconded, I should have been doing something Burnabyish, Barnumesque, or Quixotic this afternoon, instead of sitting down on a bench between a tremulous old man in almshouse livery and a small boy fanning himself with a cap. Yes; I fear I must plead guilty. I am possessed by a demon of unrest; my soul chafes at inaction, calls aloud for excitement. Had I the ordering of my own fortune I should spread the white wings of a yacht to woo the faint wind (but it may be blowing freshly off the Foreland), or should vault on the back of a neighing barb with bushy mane and tail. But I am Ixion-lashed to the wheel of duty, leg-hampered by the log of necessity.

What is a gentle-born vagabond to do?

The law will not permit him to pink with his sword-stick the first smug fellow he meets on the side-path, self-respect debars him from highway-robbery which can be perpetrated without fear of the law, and it is idle to expect a revolution in this humdrum country within any reasonable period. A General Election which is going on, with its paltry show of coloured strips of calico, its printed appeals to the gullible, its occasional bits of ribbon and bursts of cheering, its egotisms, its stupidities, its self-seekings, its shabby intrigues and simulated fire, its dull, dreary, drivelling floods of witless substance in ungrammatical form—that, surely, is no satisfying substitute for the tumult of real political strife.

Motion is the sovereign remedy for the vagabond's disease, and lo! through the leafy barrier of the pollarded limes bordering the Green, jingle the bells of the tram-car with its trotting team of three abreast. Three mules, which bring my thoughts to Spain, and to a letter I have had from my publishers, satirically asking how soon they might expect the last pages of a promised book on the land of the Dons, the first line of which is not yet committed to paper. I must think over that book as I jog along the grooves of the street rails, and survey the prospect from the roof. How do those mules on the flanks manage to avoid knocking their hoofs against the metal-ruts, and tripping themselves up? What a stand-and-deliver air the conductor has as he presents his snip-snap apparatus, like the brutal key of the primitive dentist, and viciously punches an orifice in your ticket! For these conductors, as for letter-carriers, I have a profound sympathy; they are over-worked and under-paid; and yet they enjoy motion in abundance. But there is a poetry of motion, as when charging squadrons skim the plain, or a graceful girl with dainty ankles trips across the beeswaxed floor; and there is a prose of motion, as of a policeman plodding over his beat, or the Sisyphus-toil of the treadmill. I ask myself, Will a tram-conductor ever write a poem? Hardly, I think; and yet, why not? Was not Edward Capern, who achieved some smooth verses, a letter-carrier?

New Cross, our terminus so far. Over the way is another tram, which will take us to Greenwich for the outlay of another twopence. Shortly it will be one continuous avenue of pretentious masonry, from the Thames at Blackfriars to the Thames by the naval palace, instead of the former pleasant drive through Surrey fields. With what a fever they are building, terrace upon terrace, street upon street, interminable rows of villas in line or semi-detached! The patches of verdure, so refreshing to the jaded city eye, are diminishing in size and lessening in number. I like Greenwich; but they should never have removed the veterans of the ocean from it. Dear to the soul of youth, hankering for the strange and the stirring, were their three-cornered hats, their wooden stumps, their withered monkey-jaws puffed with quids, and their hoarse, squall-tearing voices. What a consuming thirst they had, and with what heroic industry they did tell lies! Peter of Russia was right: the sovereigns of England, the sea-rulers, should hold court in Greenwich. The Park with its fallow-deer is regal; the Painted Hall is eloquent with historic memories; the initial meridian is an imposing address; and then the Thames—but here, we are at it. A steamer awaits, and will carry us to the heart of London for a groat.

How dingy, dirty, despicable most of those steamers are! with their low-roofed, grimy cabins; their irritating hawkers of hat-strings and small beer; their stale stock of mawkish refections; their job-lot orchestras of wheeze and pipe and scrape and tootle; their smell of bilge and oil, sweat and cheap cigars, overtopped at holiday-times by the sulphurous oath or the rank obscenity of some reeling passenger. And yet how skilfully they thread their way through the crowded Pool; how readily they answer the wheel; with what ease they slow or quicken their run, and dart hither and thither; and with what nicety they are brought alongside the floating wharf! I wonder do the skippers of these boats move their hands in their dreams. Is the finger-sign for "Back her," that they use at home when they wish to replenish their pipes? Collisions there may be, explosions there have been; but the career of the mariner who plies between Chelsea Pier and the port of Woolwich must be singularly free from such vicissitudes as shipwreck or failure of provisions; he is seldom caught in a tornado, or banged into by a privateer; he rarely knocks up against an iceberg, or gets a glimpse of the Flying Dutchman; sharks he may not study, except, perhaps, in the Westminster Aquarium, and when he dies he is trenched in commonplace clay. I cannot picture such a mariner to myself as having the spirit to ejaculate, "Shiver my timbers!"

The sight of a vessel from Seville laden with fruit and wine recalls me to that letter from the publishers and the book anent Spain. Not a word of it written yet. They will be shivering my timbers if I have it not ready in season. But I am not of those, like Anthony Trollope, who can sit down to their desks and turn out so many pages of copy at a stretch mechanically, much as a tinglary with its rotating handle grinds out a series of tunes. I cannot write unless I am in the mood, and that, I find, depends on the state of health and the absence of mental worry. The brain with some people refuses to become a piece of machinery. Of motion is often born inspiration—Hermes, god of oratory, is represented with petasus and talaria—and I am enjoying motion.

"Ease her—stop her!" Blackfriars Bridge, and here I quit the steamer's deck for the tram that will take me back to the place whence I came, and so enable me to have made a diversified circular tour by land and water for the expenditure of tenpence. Who would waste his substance on coach-men and high-steppers; who would envy Sir Thomas Brassey his lordly pleasure-craft, when this round of travel, with its buoyant sense of independence at the end, can be accomplished for tenpence? And now I shall hie me to a bar I wot of, and with the two pence that remain of my splendid shilling, I shall cheer the inner man with a clear, cool, mantling glass of foam-crowned bitter beer.

The beer ought to be good in Camberwell, for here Mrs. Thrale lived of yore, and the ponderous lexicographer took his walks, and mused on the vanity of human wishes. We have breweries still, and we have groves, even groves of Academus, where one may laugh; for are they not sacred to the shades of the two Hoods and Jeff Prowse, the "Nicholas" of Fun, as to Nick Woods, the Napier-recorder of Inkermann, and to associations with William Black, Henry Bessemer, and John Ruskin, master of art, which is something more, and more significant, than that Magister Artium which persons doubtful of their gifts or station ostentatiously affix to their names? And in our groves we have such variety of arborescent prizes as no other district of London can boast, extending to the arbutus or strawberry-tree, and the liriodendron or tulip-tree. The liriodendron has been planted in Palace Yard, in the hope that the breath of wholesomeness, genial to its native America, shall permeate the badly-ventilated atmosphere of the adjacent House of Commons. I love trees as if I were suckled by a hamadryad. May he who cuts them down to build whereon they stood taste the bitterness of Acheron!

And Camberwell Green, which I dearly affect, is it not replete with every modern convenience, as those ambitious amateurs who write the auction-bills are wont to phrase it? There is a bank where you may cash a cheque; two public-houses where you may spend great part of it fuddling yourself; a police-station where you may sleep the fuddle off; a pillar-box where a letter may be posted summoning a bail to your aid; a drinking-fountain where you may slake your thirst when you come out penitent from the police-office; a Turkish-bath, with a crescent-and-star daubed piece of bunting over it, where you may knead your frame into sobriety; a hairdresser's where you may make yourself presentable; a stationer's where my friend Morris will lavishly dose you with the tonic of moral apothegm; and, right opposite, a horse-trough where you may give yourself the ducking you deserve.

Inside the tavern, where I sought the beer, I met a financier, a shrewd fellow of a gross habit of body and a dry wit. He is accountant to a firm of book-makers, and can hold his own with the tongue; he married into the family of a late eminent prizefighter, and, with the connection, seems to have acquired the talent of holding his own with the fist. I like Wat much, and have obtained various scraps of desultory information from him which are useful.

Imprimis, that a penny ticket on a river-steamer on a Sunday constitutes a man as bonâ fide a traveller as Henry M. Stanley, and endows him with the privilege of getting liquid comfort within prohibited hours.

Item, that the cigars on the outside of a bundle, and therefore indented with the tape, are generally the best.

Item, that if there is hide or pelt on a carcase before a butcher's stall, you may take for granted it is a British carcase. Foreign meat has to be skinned to avoid the risk of importation of cattle-disease.

And, ultimately, that if you are about to drown yourself in the Thames, and are anxious to avert identification, the best spot to throw yourself off is in the neighbourhood of a ship at moorings, as then you are likely to be drawn under her and kept in the chains for months.

Some readers who are unaware that there were no gentlemen with coat-armour in the College of Apostles, may object that in presenting them to Wat I am introducing them to low society; but I can assure them that I have seen a very respectable Duke hail-fellow-well-met with a jockey, and my friend Wat has a far fuller education than the primest of jockeys. He is apt and accurate in quotations from English literature; and if you venture to make Greeks "meet" Greeks in his presence, or talk of fresh "fields" and pastures new, or attribute the tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb to Holy Writ, he will lay you ten to one in sovereigns you are wrong, and win your money. He is also a champion orthographist, and will back himself to spell English words against any man in the British Empire for £500, bar words technical.

"Ah," he said, "my noble! is it true you are going on a lecturing-tour next winter?"

"If God but spare me health and lung-power I am," was my reply.

"And wherefore, may I ask? Can you not do better at the desk?"

"The desk is monotonous; besides, I yearn for change, and I may be able to freshen up my ideas, and set down some notes in my tables. 'Twill improve intellectual and physical health."

"It will, of course," agreed Wat. "For instance, it will be perfectly delightful journeying to Inverness, say, in the depth of December."

"As it so happens, I am booked for Inverness on a date in that month."

Wat stared at me. "Do you know," he said, "'tis a far cry to Loch Awe, and Inverness is at the other side of Loch Awe? Thither and back from where we stand is eleven hundred and ninety miles."

I was surprised; I had not entered into these details; but I held my peace.

"Have you got many engagements?"

"Yes; the first was from Dollar, which I accept as a good omen; and, curiously enough, 'tis not in the United States."

"No," said Wat; "'tis between Edinburgh and Stirling. What fee do they tender you there?"

I told him.

"Ahem!" he continued, fondling his chin as he spoke. "If you don't cumber yourself with luggage—a courier-bag will do—and if you bus it to King's Cross, and stop at a temperance hotel in 'Auld Reekie,' and give servants no tips, and condescend to all invitations, with a wise economy, I take it, you won't drop more than five-and-twenty shillings on that transaction."

"How! What do you mean? You surely are not serious?"

"Why, the railway return fare to Edinburgh alone is five-pun-nine-and-six; and that will burn a hole in your fee."

"Perhaps," I ventured, not to look foolish, "I may have means of getting to Edinburgh for nothing."

"Ah!" said Wat, with a sigh and a sorrowful sententiousness, "if you think you can try on that, well and good; but I'm getting so precious fat that I can no longer hide myself under a seat!"

The barman, who had overheard the dialogue, here burst into an ill-bred fit of laughter. That attendant had some appreciation of humour; but Wat did the correct thing, nevertheless, in rebuking him for his untimely hilarity. The barman should have waited until he had retired to his own room.

This lecturing, as I explained to the financier, is rather a hazardous experiment after a man has passed his fortieth year. It is like learning to act—even more arduous than that, for you have no prompter, and must be qualified to think upon your legs. Interruptions must not check the flow of your eloquence; indifference must not chill your enthusiasm. You must be suave, alert, sonorous, and roll forth a discourse got off by rote as if it were the offspring of the moment's inspiration. The combustion of thought must appear to be a spontaneous combustion. Once your tale is set a-going, there must be no pause, no hesitancy; the electric current must be maintained to strong and constant power, or your audience sinks into a freezing dulness of courteous attention, which wishes, but fears, to yawn.

"Yes," said Wat, "the steam must be kept up. But if a Derby dog strays on the course—I mean if a bullock blunders on the track, what then?"

"That is the difficulty. It is vexatious if a man dozes off and endeavours to balance himself on the tip of his nose on the floor, when you are in the high ecstasy of a rhetorical period."

"I know," said Wat. "When you are what you call piling up the agony."

"Or when a deaf dowager is seized with a fancy to sternutate as you are waxing pathetic."

"Sternutate. That's a good word," remarked Wat admiringly. "I swear I could spell that. By-the-bye, how are you getting on with that book on Spain?"

Ecce iterum Crispinus.

"Good-afternoon I am just on my way home to write it."

* * * * *

The title I shall leave to the finish. Something catching is sure to suggest itself. The dedication I pencilled off months ago. Let that stand.

The subject, I think, is good. Spain is comparatively unknown. John Bull on his travels will not open to it. The British tourist in the Peninsula too often carries with him his native sense of superiority and his constitutional tendency to spleen. He turns up his nose at what he cannot, or will not, understand. If the beef is tough, he does not consider that it ought to be, most of the animals from whose ribs it came having done honest work as beasts of burden before they were driven to the slaughter-house. If the Val de Peñas is rasping to his palate, he ignores that the taste for wine, as for olives and Dublin stout and Glenlivat, is acquired. If the tobacco is coarse and weedy, he forgets that it is cheap, and that he can roll his cigarette and smoke it between the courses. But why does he not console himself for the absent by what is present—the ripe golden sun, the luscious fruits, the picturesque costumes, the high-bred dignity of the humblest beggar, the weird Æolian melody of sudden trills of song, the flashing eyes, mantilla-shaded, which speak romances in three volumes in every glance? The truth is, your Briton abroad, I mean the average one—not men like Mr. Gladstone in Sicily, or Captain Burton everywhere, Queen's Messengers and Special Correspondents, travelling Fellows of Oxford and pilgrims of art—your Briton of the tourist type is less inclined to adapt himself to another sphere than to try and assimilate that other to his own.

This tourist goes to Spain; he hurries from end to end of the Peninsula, his guide-book in his hand and his opera-glass across his shoulder; he pays a flying visit to the Escurial, and pronounces it a gloomy crib; drops in on Seville, sees it, and does not marvel; mayhap he wanders as far as Granada, and finds it a dreary "sell;" and then he returns homeward, hot and tired and disappointed, and is eloquent on the rapacity of innkeepers, the profusion of counterfeit coin, the discomforts and unpunctuality of locomotion, the shocking uncleanliness—but, however, "you know, we got on better than the Joneses; we saw more sights and covered more country in fewer days." And this peripatetic postures for the rest of his life as an authority on Spain! The only point, perhaps, on which his judgment is to be accepted is one which he might have learned in London, namely, that Price's circus is not quite so good as Sanger's in Westminster or Hengler's off Oxford Street. Out upon the poor fool! He know Spain! Why, that is more than I could dare to say, and I have had experience of it under Monarchy and Republic, in peace and in war; have mixed with Carlists in the field, and Intransigentes in the fortress; have traversed it from Irun to Gibraltar, from Santander to Malaga. He who has not been admitted into the intimacy of domestic life in Spain, who has not listened to habaneras by the camp-fire, joined in the jota on the village sward, shared in thorough sympathy in the sports of the arena and in the rites of religion, dipped into the peasant's olla podrida, nay, even watched the flushed gamblers over their cards, with the eager-eyed baratero standing by—he does not know Spain. All this have I done, and more; and yet I am but on the threshold of acquaintance with that great and beautiful home of paradox, that land of valour and courtesy, of fidelity and magnanimity, of piety and patriotism; and, in a lesser degree, of the vices which are opposed to these good qualities. No country of Europe so near to us is so little known. Yet in none is the soil fertilized by so much British blood. But this was in the bygone; and the yearly increasing swell of journeying-against-time tourists has not swept in tidal wave over the Peninsula. Even Spanish plays—and Spain can boast of one of the richest springs of dramatic literature in Europe—are comparatively sacred from the desecrating touch of the ruck of contemporary English stage adulterators.

Spain is not known; and yet it is not for the lack of word-painters to make it familiar in pen-and-ink pictures. There is Ford, most learned and graphic of guides, as full of irresistible prejudice as he is of impulsive affection. There is Borrow, that robust, quaint, and captivating, if sometimes over-fanciful, cicerone, albeit his errand to Spain was as indiscreet in purpose as it was bootless in result. There is Sala, of memory richly stored—whom I freely salute as past-master in his craft—most charming, observant, and illustrative of roving journalists. Ford, Borrow, Sala, all know Spain and "things Spanish" by personal experience; but it is plain that too many of the latter-day critics of Spain and the Spaniards are of the class who are ready to write social novels on Chinese life with no more knowledge of the Flowery Land than is to be obtained under the dome of the Reading-room of the British Museum. The pity of it is that this second-hand evidence is too often taken on trust, while the truthful records of eye-witnesses are shoved into a dusty corner of the cupboard. It is so nice to be patted on the head and rubbed down with the grain, to be reminded that we are what we always thought ourselves to be—the perfect, the registered A 1 people of the universe, the people who set the pattern, the people who are righteous, moral, honest, tolerant, charitable, and modest; who wage no unjust wars; who have no Divorce Court scandals; who know not bank frauds; who never persecuted Highlanders, or Jews, or Irishmen; who permit no misappropriations of money left to the poor; who make no brag over small victories against badly-armed savages. But stay, this is taking me to Africa, not Spain; and Africa does not begin at the other side of the Pyrenees, the epigram of Dumas to the contrary notwithstanding. My great object is to coax the English reader to be reasonable, and not to take the dimensions of the round world by the parochial yard-measure, nor to gauge the Coliseum by the standard of Clapham.

However, I shall not complete this work unless I make a start. Dimidium facti—but these odds and ends of Latin, which give to style an eighteen-penny polish of erudition and prove nothing, you can pick at will from "Swain's Collection of Easy Sentences." If I wait till I am in the mood, my suspense may be as long as that of the rustic on the bank of the stream. Perhaps Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was near the mark when he said that the author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted.

And now a paragraph to elucidate why I have dedicated this book to a gentleman with whom I never exchanged a word. Apart from the bright and solid facts that he wards the weak, and has the pluck to change his opinions when he feels himself in the wrong, there are in his case two reasons all-sufficient to secure his counterfeit presentment a niche in my album, and himself a nook in my heart—he hath killed a bull in the arena, and he is husband of Byron's grand-daughter; and Byron was a poet—yea, a poet, I re-affirm, the hysterics to the contrary of sixteen screaming laudatores Veneris in non-lucid intervals counting for naught.

* * * * *

I have lost faith in Wat. In a moment of misplaced confidence I laid a wager on him at a spelling competition. He put one n in innuendo, and the i after the lls in paillasse. If he had only gone to the root of the matter! I offered such long odds, too—a frayed copy of the "Iliad" to a gilt and morocco-bound set of the "Newgate Calendar."

CHAPTER II

The Old-Fashioned Invocation—"Them 'ere Spanish Kings!"—Candidates for a Throne—En Voyage—Bordeaux and the Back-ache—An Unmannerly Alsatian—The Patriot gets a Roland for his Oliver—Small Change for a Hot Bath—Plan for Universal Coinage—Daughters of Israel—The Jews Diagnosed—Across the Border—The Writer is Saluted "Caballero"—Bugaboo Santa Cruz—Over a Brasero.

O MULES, liquorice, onions, oranges, garlic, and eke figs, cork and olives, and all you other products of Spain, come to my aid now that I enter upon my theme! Why should not a prose-chronicler of this era proffer his appeal as did the poets of era undetermined, of the eras of Augustus or the Second Charles? Perchance the Θεα, Musa, or Muse, to whom he makes his plea, may prove less kind than those to whom Homer, Virgil, or Milton prayed; but he has his remedy. In most instances, he can eat them.

Having complied with what used to be a hallowed custom, I shall now, following the example of that shrewd man, the late Abraham Lincoln, proceed to tell a story. The deadly sin in any book is dulness, and an occasional anecdote—if it point a moral so much the better—is sovran balsam for spleen.

I had a literary friend in London, and as he once returned to his residence by Regent's Park after a long walk, and asked had anyone called during his absence, the housekeeper replied "No;" but, correcting herself, added, "leastways, nobody, sir, except one of them 'ere Spanish kings!"

The Spanish king who was of no consequence was one of the race of Pretenders, and had the proud blood of countless generations of thick-lipped Bourbons meandering through his veins.

In the February of 1873, from which my personal knowledge of Spain dates, there were quite a number of these Spanish kings on the carpet. Amadeus, the Italian, had vacated the throne on the 11th, in a message which substantially affirmed that the peaceful government of Spain was hopeless—his Majesty gave it up as a bad job—and the two Chambers, combining as the sovereign Cortes, proclaimed the Republic by a majority of four to one. Of the aspirants to the crown there were notably Don Carlos Maria de los Dolores, the legitimate heir—if there be any virtue in legitimacy—and Don Alfonso, only son of the deposed Isabella, a boy of fifteen, at school at Vienna, a legitimate claimant if the abolition of the Salic law in 1830 be acknowledged. There was one who might have been a king, but sensibly declined the proffered honour, in the person of the ancient Espartero, Duke of Victory, Prince of Vergara; and there was a Prussian princeling, a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who had been nominated king in the midsummer of 1870, and whose nomination afforded the coveted pretext for the war between France and Germany. Besides, every Captain-General in the country—and the allowance is five—was a king in prospectu, not to mention the multifarious leaders of the many parties in the Congress, all of whom were qualified to be kings in their own conceit. Spain being thus suffering from a plethora of kings—as one result of which the Republic existed—it struck those who had commissioned me to chronicle the humours of besieged Paris that I might find some material for instructive and entertaining writing at the other side of the Pyrenees.

There are several ways of getting to Madrid. I had no difficulty in selecting mine—in fact, I had no choice. It was my duty to go there by the quickest route, no matter what the expense, the danger, or the inconvenience. These were the terms implied in my bond. The first stage was to Bordeaux. Over that I shall not dwell beyond a passing note on the excitement of the mad drive from terminus to terminus through Paris streets, in the early morn, at the rate of four statute miles an hour, in order, as Brother Jonathan has it, to "establish connection," and the misery of the long railway pilgrimage south. The scenery, I believe, was lovely; but fatigue, and the worry of a constrained position, and the frequent jerky stops as one was dozing to sleep, and the impatient summons "en voiture" as the hungry man was settling to a square meal, indisposed one for the proper appreciation of the picturesque. I got so eye-dazed from the whirl and dust and flitting sentinels of telegraph-posts on the long music-lines of telegraph-wires, that I could not distinguish a life-buoy from a funeral wreath. There were no sleeping-cars between Paris and Bordeaux then; back-ache, with an occasional variety in the shape of migraine, is my principal memory of that journey. Back-ache, the reader will allow, would take the poetry out of a honeymoon trip. And here I interpose a short parenthesis to register my acknowledgment to the philanthropist who invented sleeping-cars with their complementary accommodations. He is a benefactor to travelling humanity. Statues have been erected to dozens who have done less good to their kind—soldiers, lawyers, politicians, and patent pill-makers. Sleeping-cars avert exhaustion, ill-humour, bad dreams, and kidney-disease, not to exclude the back-ache and migraine afore-mentioned. Whenever a bronze memorial is to be raised on the Thames Embankment to their inventor, I am ready with my contribution.

At Bordeaux, where I shuffled into the nearest hotel, I uncoiled myself, and took the kinks out of my bones; but of the wine capital I shall say no more than that "I came, I slept, I left." At leaving, a little adventure variegated the itinerary. As I entered the railway-carriage, a gentleman on the opposite seat, its only occupant, was sucking an orange. I pulled out my cigar-case, and politely asked him if he had any objection to my smoking.

"Are you a German?" he demanded stiffly.

"Pardon me," I said, "I inquired if you had any objection to my smoking."

"Are you a German?" he repeated almost fiercely, his eyes flashing.

"I fail to see what business it is of yours what my nationality may be."

"It is my business, and I insist on your answering my question," he shouted, dropping the orange in his anger.

"And I decline to answer it," I said quietly.

Now he fairly raged. There is nothing which so provokes a man of hasty temper, with whom you may be in a controversy, as to preserve a tranquil, self-possessed demeanour. Ladies who nag their husbands are aware of this interesting feature in household ethics.

"Ah, you are a German!" he yelled. "You are a Prussian. I will not sit in the same compartment with you'!" and he stood up, and danced, and went through a round of epileptic gesticulation.

"Your absence will not leave me inconsolable," said I, in soft, sweet accents, ceremoniously lifting my hat.

He bounced out of the carriage like a maniac, stamped along the platform, muttering with incoherent vehemence as he went, and presently reappeared with a gendarme, whom he informed that he suspected I was a Prussian spy. Interrogated, he could advance no proof beyond his own suspicions, my arrogant coolness of manner, and my hesitation in returning a straightforward reply.

"I am sure he is," he concluded, "for he all but admitted it."

The gendarme was perplexed, and asked me very civilly, was I a German?

"Distinctly not," I answered.

Had Monsieur any papers? I produced my British passport, which he looked at, pretended to understand, folded up, returned to me with excuses for having given me so much trouble, and fixed a look of grave reproach on his countryman. The latter was embarrassed, and had not the grace to make a frank apology, but mumbled something to the effect that I might have saved all this annoyance if I had stated what countryman I was at first.

"If you had put your question in the French fashion, that is to say courteously, I might have done so," I said.

He blushed, and stammered forth the apology at last; he hoped I would forgive his quickness, but he could not control himself when he met a German; he hated the race—the Germans were a pack of cold-blooded robbers, who had brought ruin on his country. He had vowed vengeance against them, and he had reason for it, for he was an Alsatian.

I saw my chance.

"Mon Dieu!" I exclaimed, throwing up my hands in affected horror. "It is you who are the German, then, and not I. Do you not know, sir, that Alsace has been a province of Germany for the past two years?"

If the face be an index to the mind, that Alsatian must have passed through a mental cyclone. Luckily for the angel who records bad language, his rage was so terrible that he lost the power of speech, the while I gently moved my head to and fro, and gazed at him with compassionate remonstrance, as much as to say how could he, a sausage-eating creature, have had the heart to pass himself off on me as a Frenchman? It was cruel, but it was merited. That Alsatian I despised as the meanest thing in patriotism I had ever met—and my experience of the article is not limited—for even were I a German, so long as I behaved myself with propriety he had no right to insult me by his surly cross-examination. But I suppose the poor devil thought he was playing the rôle of redresser of the wrongs of his country, and exacting an instalment of that revanche of which we hear occasional frothing babble. If I were a German I should be proud of it, and I hope I should have had the firmness to tell my Alsatian interlocutor so to his teeth.

From Bordeaux to Bayonne, down through the Landes, is a most interesting ride, as I dimly recollect; but I have no notes of it, and I infer that nothing particular occurred as I sped through the fat, nice, pleasant country. I had a short stay at Bayonne—long enough, however, to enable me to mark by ethnological signs and tinge of complexion that Spain was near. There were architectural signs, too, for there were colonnades in some of the streets to shelter promenaders from the powerful sun. Plenty of soldiers in Bayonne, and plenty of Hebrews. All of the latter seem to be engaged in the money-changing business. The whole art of money-changing consists in undervaluing the coin you are buying, and setting an exaggerated value on that you are giving for it. I must have lost a small fortune in the course of my money-changing transactions, therefore am I a most determined adherent of a uniform system of coinage for all civilized nations; and that coinage, I maintain, should be decimal. Fancy a foreigner getting small money for a sovereign after he has incurred a debt of one and sixpence for a hot salt-water bath on the South Coast! The fair attendant offers him a crown-piece, two half-crowns, two florins, two shillings, two six-pences, two groats, two threepenny bits, a postage stamp, a wheedling simper and a charity-bob. He is puzzled, and to my thinking he is justified in being puzzled; and if the attendant be not exceedingly attractive he is cheated. Coinage should be simple—should be so plain in identity that a child could distinguish it in the dark, and its worth should descend in regulated gradation. This reform will come eventually. One of the objections to a universal mintage may be that there would be a struggle as to whose profile should be sunk into the stamps—a point on which many rulers are solicitous, for they foresee that it is the only species of immortality they will ever attain. His Majesty of Araucania might legitimately protest against having his individuality merged in the lineaments of the artistic concretion of the Republic of San Marino, and the Queen of Madagascar (what is her name, by-the-bye?) might not easily be weaned from a natural longing for the luxury of having her own face in the perpetual youthfulness of Hebe imprinted on the discs which circulate at Tananarivo. That objection might be met in two ways; one side of the coin might be common to all the world, and the other reserved for the vanities, or the vanities might toss up, and acquire the renown of the numismatist's glass-case in turn.

That the reform will come I am convinced, but not while the Hebrews can hinder it. It is their interest to have this diversity of coinage; and they are very conservative of what is their interest. I have for a long time been trying to make up my mind about the Hebrews. My sympathies fly out to them because they have been persecuted, foully persecuted, on account of their religious belief, while, on the other hand, my antipathies are stirred because they make to themselves an idol of gold. Beautiful are the daughters of Israel with a striking Old Testament beauty, marvellously imperious considering the lengthened apprenticeship of helotry through which they have served; but naïveté is not the quality one would look for in their countenances. As well seek a dimple, or a blush, or a coy reserve. Oh! beautiful indeed, and to an imposing degree, with long straight nose, full orbs, pursing lips, clean-chiselled regular contour; but the earliest lesson they learn is how many grains Troy go to a silver shekel. They may have in them still the fire of Jael, who drove the tent-peg into the skull of the tyrant, or the fierce genius of the poetic Deborah, who was one of the first to strike the lyre of triumph; but, alas! that it must be said, the gentle Ruth, gleaning in the fields of barley, is a lost tradition of the race. I can almost imagine the tender-eyed Leah and the well-favoured Rachel figuring in an idyl of another Wakefield family; but, then, where are we to seek for them? Not in Bayonne. There are no artless Jewesses there; the pupils under their black lashes glitter with the glow of cupidity, and I prefer the light of love. There is something in it more womanly and mellow. I have seen the eyes of a Jewess almost bulge out of their sockets like those of the telescope fish, as she gazed on the treasures of Notre Dame at Paris—to me a degrading dilatation—and I set it down to the instincts engendered by centuries of servitude, when the Jews discovered that the surest mode of checkmating their masters was by amassing money, and lending it out to them at usurious rates. Certes, they are a pushing and clannish tribe, and skilled in the mimetic arts; but they are not so high-souled and all-influential as their friend Disraeli would fain make them in a chapter of elaborate gush in that fine novel, "Coningsby." In the main I admire them; but I could wish that they stripped to manual toil oftener; that they were less obsequious in indigence, and less despotic and dictatorial when they are in authority—niggers and Hindoos can be that; that they were less prone to exhibit their entire stock-in-trade in the shop-window; that they were less ostentatious in their hospitality, when they are hospitable, and that they had a quieter taste in raiment. Now, I think I have had ample retribution out of that greasy matron at Bayonne, who exploited me when converting my honest notes of the Bank of England into Spanish duros.

From Bayonne the train rattled along not far from the fringe of the Bay of Biscay, by Biarritz and St. Jean de Luz, and across the bridge spanning the Bidassoa to Irun, the border town of Spain, close by Fontarabia's wooded height. Here we had a pause for customs and passport examination and change of carriages. No railway official could give me any information as to how far the line went; it might go to Madrid, it might not go more than a few miles; the country was unsettled. These officials impressed me as sulky or stupid or timorous, or all three combined, and made glaring contrast with the smart servants on the London, Chatham and Dover line, who know everything that regards their calling, and are always quick and decisive in answer without taint of rudeness. But I was recalled from my comparisons by one word, which wrought a magic effect upon me.

That word was "caballero!"

How elated I felt! I realized that I was in Spain, and seemed to grow in inches and self-esteem. I lent myself to an unconscious swagger, tipped my hat jauntily on one side of my head, and was swayed by an almost irresistible inclination to retire to some unobserved corner and wax the ends of my moustache.

The speaker was a Guardia Civil, the Spanish equivalent for a French gendarme. A solemn man in a cocked-hat, protected by a glazed cover, his complexion was of sickly walnut-juice sallow, like the flesh-tint on a portrait in oils by an old master. The complexion was characteristically Spanish. He was the State personified, and had much dignity. He told me I might count upon getting to Beasain, a village in a valley at this side of one of the mountains of the Pyrenean range, but that progress beyond that by rail was problematical, as the Cura Santa Cruz had torn up the track.

This was the first I had heard of the Cura Santa Cruz, one of the most ferocious and redoubtable of the partisans of Don Carlos. Truculent were the stories which were told of him. He was Raw-head-and-bloody-bones in cassock; priest and picaroon, with a well-developed tendency towards wholesale murder; Bogie with a breviary—that is, according to some. According to others, he was a brave, disinterested and reverend patriot; a sort of Hofer-cum-Tell individual, etherealized by the sanctity of his vocation. Anyhow, be he maleficent or benign, it was clear that he was Somebody, and had filled the whole country-side with awe. He led a corps of guerrilleros, who rejoiced in the nickname of the Black Band; and such was the terror inspired by their exploits, that the whisper that Santa Cruz was hovering near stunned opposition, and brought in any ransom demanded. He must have been in one of his benign moods on this occasion, for he permitted our train free passage through his territory; and in the evening we drew up in a snow-bound basin, where shuddered the straggling hamlet of Beasain. I took up my lodging for the night in a two-storied cabin, and sent a news-letter to London, recounting what I had seen and heard so far. I was urged to this by an intimation which had reached me, that a rival had preceded me on the road to Madrid by twenty-four hours. The first blow is half the battle, and I calculated that if I could get the ear of the public in advance of him, there would be a point gained. Communication with England was open from Beasain. Heaven knows how it would be to-morrow or next day.

There was fearful tangible evidence of the presence of Santa Cruz in this remote valley. At one extremity where the cavernous opening of the railway tunnel made a dark gap in the hillside, the track had been wrenched from its fastenings, and the sleepers smeared with oil and set on fire. Heaps of charred timber marked the spot, and alongside, down in a ravine, lay the wreck of shattered carriages and locomotive, just as they had been tumbled in a topsy-turvy blending of complete collapse. It made me tremble to reflect what this meant, and I came to the conclusion that Santa Cruz was thoroughgoing in his warfare and restrained by few scruples of compassion.

Over the fumes of the brasero, the brass-pan with its stifling embers of charcoal, placed on a stand in the middle of my room, my landlord and I with outstretched palms held long confab before I turned into bed. His mother had been French, and we gossiped in that tongue. His views were tolerably impartial, but it was plain that the Carlists had his good wishes. The factions were partially dispersed, but were not defeated, he said; they would give more trouble; and then he horrified me with a well-authenticated tale of a recent fight at Aspeitia, where an old villager had taken refuge in a house which was subsequently occupied by the troops. He fell dead after a volley fired by the Carlists. His son was one of those who had joined in the volley, and the awful muffled rumour was spreading among the peasantry that it was by the son's bullet the father had been slain.

CHAPTER III.

A Make-Believe Spain—The Mountain Convoy—A Tough Road to Travel—Spanish Superiority in Blasphemy—Short Essay on Oaths—The Basque Peasants—Carlism under a Cloak—How Guerilla-Fighting is Conducted—A Hyperborean Landscape—A Mysterious Grandee—An Adventurous Frenchman—The Shebeen on the Summit—Armed Alsasua—Base Coin.

AND this is sunny Spain, the land of the olive and the vine. Spain it certainly is in the absolute sense of the word in political geography, but in no other. It is no more Spain than the Highlands are England. The language, the race, the habits, the growths, are different. The language, the Euscara, is known to only one man not born within the borders, the polyglot Prince Lucien Buonaparte. A hackneyed legend runs that the devil tried to learn it, and dislocated his jaw. The race is the aboriginal Iberian, and has none of the languor of the south in it—a stubborn, not a supple race. The habits of the people are industrious. The growths are rather of the apple and the pine than the olive and the vine.

There before us rises the wall of Nature's handiwork which shuts us out from the true Spain.

In my boyhood I often gazed with admiration on a print of Napoleon crossing the Alps. He was astride of a prancing white charger. I have since learned to detest Napoleon, and to know more of mountain travel. That masterful general, but cruel, dishonourable, bad man—demon-man with genius undoubted and will unbendable, but with the most unscrupulous of insatiate and insensate ambitions, and a leaven of littleness—did not face the heights of St. Bernard on a mettlesome steed, but on a patient mule, and the luxury of his apparel was restricted to furs. Wrapped up in the thickest clothing I could find, I watched the convoy forming outside the station at Beasain in the sunlit cold.

The train from San Sebastian got in at nine in the morning, and before ten a procession of six waggons, built after the massive, clumsy fashion of the French diligence, was drawn up in line. Horses and mules, generally in teams of five—three leaders and two wheelers—were yoked to the ramshackle vehicles. The passengers, muffled in cloaks, rugs, scarfs, shawls and comforters—for there was ice in the breath of the keen air of the mountain—literally packed themselves in the narrow "insides" of the old-fashioned coaches. There were five in the low, narrow hutch upon wheels with myself, all males; we were as close as sardines in a box. There were some ladies of the party. I trust they had more space at their disposal. The luggage was piled on the roofs and covered with tarpaulins, the drivers mounted the seats in front, whips were cracked, and off we bounded at a pace that would rouse the applause, or peradventure the envy, of the gentlemen who tool the Brighton coach. Gaily our skinny steeds breasted the rise, sending a curl of mist from their hides, and shaking merry music out of the collars of bells round their necks as they clattered over the hard road. For three miles we dashed along at express speed. How spirit-stirring is rapid motion! I actually was warming into a wild joy, and praying that we might encounter the Carlists, under the influence of this gallop in the bracing morning atmosphere.

Suddenly there is a stop. The Carlists? No. But here the ascent begins, and a body of mountaineers await us with a string of bullocks. The three leaders are unharnessed and attached behind; and eight bullocks, two by two, are yoked in front of the pair of mules who act as wheelers. The same is done with the other waggons. I watch this process of yoking the bullocks with much curiosity. A strong piece of board is run across the heads of the pair who are coupled, and firmly tied in front of the horns; a sheepskin is thrown over that, for what purpose I cannot tell; and the ropes by which the bullocks drag us are fastened to the piece of board afore-mentioned. They pull, not against the shoulder, but against the horn. Their owners, muscular peasants, lightly clad, though it is cold, walk beside them with long pointed sticks, and occasionally goad them in the flanks. When that does not suffice, they push them, or rain blows on their hides, or twist their tails, and when all other means fail they swear at them. But the grave oxen move no quicker; they cling to their own gait as if deeply convinced of the truth of the adage, "Fair and easy goes far in the day." The peasants call one "demonio" and another a cow; but the sleepy pair keep never minding, as they waddle along with drooping heads, held closely together as if whispering conspiracy.

At this early point in my experiences, the painful knowledge is forced upon me that the Spaniards are highly accomplished in the art of imprecation. If our army swore terribly in Flanders, I have my theory to account for it. They must have picked up the habit there, and the Spaniards under Alva had left their traces behind them in the speech of the region they had occupied. As a rule, swearing betrays a poverty of invention; it is the resource of the vulgar and ignorant to emphasize their assertions; but in Spain the swearing developed an originality that almost reconciled one to it. There was an awful insolence, a ribald riotousness in some of the oaths which redeemed them from the scorn which every well-balanced mind should feel for displays of petulance. I respect a good round oath—an oath that blanches my cheeks and makes me imagine that it would not be extraordinary if the ground were to open and swallow the varlet who uttered it. That sort of oath is to be tolerated for its audacity. The malediction is a higher form of oath, and some maledictions are magnificent. To the amateur I can recommend King Lear's upon Cordelia, Francesco Cenci's upon Beatrice—which is more Shakspearian than Shakspeare—and even puny Moore's upon the traitorous Gheber. The joint-stock oath which Sterne puts into the mouths of the Abbess of Andoüillets and the novice, Margarita, who had the whitlow on her middle finger, is passable for its fantastic ingenuity; and the strong locutions pat in the lips of a certain Duke—unless notoriety belies him—are to be licensed because of his rank, and because he is a soldier. But he should have the courage to blurt them out on all occasions. He who dares to outrage society should not shrink from offending an individual.

"You —— naughty boy, why did you sound the wrong call?" said H.R.H. to a bugler, but as soon as he got out of earshot of a certain Personage, he muttered in an angry undertone, "You canonized little beggar, you know what I meant."

The Spaniards are liberal and earnest and dogged in their railings, anathemas, and execrations, but still the sleepy oxen do not hurry themselves. They care no more for a volley of select comminations than the jackdaw of Rheims did for the archbishop's curse. Of a verity this bullock's pace is a snail's pace, and we have ample leisure to inspect the peasants as we crawl along. Brawny, hardy, and firmly-knit as Highlandmen, their faces are weather-beaten and frank; their manner, when one speaks to them, independent but polite; in dress like unto their Celtic kinsmen of Brittany, short-jacketed, loose, and slovenly, but in stature more like to the tall mountaineers of Tipperary. They must be poor, very poor; but they have the appearance of content, and with it of honesty, sobriety, and civility.

And now a little secret must be imparted. Every man-jack of these ox-drivers is a Carlist, and that is the reason we are not attacked to-day! In a week those innocent clowns may be blazing away at the regular army of Spain from the brushwood on a hillside, for after such fashion are Carlist wars conducted. A band assembles at the call of some chief—that is to say, the peasants leave their cabins and meet at some rock, some conspicuous tree, or some cross-roads. They have with them a flag, perhaps; perhaps a priest or two; they are badly armed with such arms as insurgents carry—blunderbusses, flint-muskets, fowling-pieces, horse-pistols; they have no distinctive uniform, except a few of the older bands—the permanent army of Carlism—which are clad in the seedy clothes that the French Garde Mobile wore during the late war. The campaign opens; a descent is made upon some village, the mayor is asked to supply so many hundred rations, and the young men are summoned to join the flag. Sometimes the mayor refuses, and there is a fight between "the volunteers of liberty," that is to say, the local national guard, and the Carlists. On the average, so the reports go, one man is killed in each of these combats, and three wounded. That is a battle at this stage of the Carlist war. With the regular troops sent against them the Carlists act otherwise. They take up ground in some inaccessible eyrie, pop at the passing detachments from their ambuscade, draw them on in the hope of catching them in a trap; but the troops are cautious, they pepper away at the Carlists from a distance until the Carlists run, and the affair ends, as usual, with the loss of one man killed and three wounded. The peasants return to their cabins to tell the tale of their gallantry, and if the troops perchance should come their way, why they are but inoffensive, ingenuous tillers of the soil, the most peaceful beings on the face of nature. The firearm is hid in the thatch or in the neighbouring hedge. But the officers who lead the troops do not allow their enemies the monopoly of gasconade. In the Gaceta de Madrid the bulletin of the engagement duly appears, and the names of the doughty warriors are chronicled for the admiration of the señoritas. One Carlist chief—at least, so pretend the wags—had been killed outright thrice, wounded mortally five times, and has had his band completely dispersed and broken up seven times in the Gaceta, and yet he is still alive and troublesome. A most outlandish war, but how disastrous in its effects on the trade and prosperity of the country! It could not be carried on if the soil were not rich to plenteousness. There is an adventurous vigour in the breed, too, and the terrain lends itself to guerilla fighting. So far, I know nothing of the merits of Carlism; but this I can divine, that it is the old rivalry betwixt town and country, and the "pagans" or villagers are all Carlists—question of transmitted feud or local traditions, or both. The rustics have the advantage over the town-bred men; they are familiar with the by-paths; every sheiling is a refuge for them, every dweller therein a self-constituted scout. When they choose to seek them, they must have secure hiding-places. Artillery is an arm of derision in the hills; cavalry can rarely act effectually, and in the way of reconnoitring is next to useless, as its movements can be espied from rock-cover on every eminence; but in the open these insurgents can do nothing against disciplined troops. Pity that they should be such fools as to abandon their pleasant and comfortable, if humble, homesteads, to help on the aspirations of any right-divine make-believe claimant to the heaven-sent mission—by accident of birth—of impressing other human beings that he is wiser than they, and should have revenues and reverence for condescending to govern them.

What would our ox-drivers do, I wonder, if they could overhear and understand the conversation in which thoughts like these are exchanged in the lumbering Noah's ark they are helping through their domain? We are getting nigh and nigher to the clouds, and the quilt of snow on the mountain grows thicker. The pathway is traceable only by the marks of the hoofs of beasts of burden and the ruts of wheels, and the fleecy banks at each side rise gradually higher. It is palpably colder, and yet we are far from the culminating point of the Pyrenean pass; straight saplings are not infrequent around, and here and there a lowly hut in a nook under some sheltering rock, both hut and rock hoary with snow, startles us with the reminder that human beings actually live here. The Basques, said Voltaire, are a people who sing and dance on the summit of the Pyrenees. Our ox-drivers do not sing, neither do our muleteers. This interminable glare is becoming very fatiguing to the eyes, and the higher we ascend the rarer are the refreshing little streaks of darker hue. Stumps of dwarf trees replace the straight saplings to be seen lower down; and hardly are we on the crest of one snow-capped hill than another, hidden under the same smooth sheet of everlasting lime-white, mocks us. Slowly and painfully the oxen toil along, and the peasants by their side sink knee-deep at every step. Will this ever end? It was picturesque at first to watch the long caravan coiling over the spiral track which turns right and left like a corkscrew. Now it is tedious, for we are chilled and worn-out, hungry and cramped. The sublimity of nature is grandiose, but there may be too much of it. One tires of rolling perpetual cigarettes; one even tires of studying the forcible Spanish adjurations that begin with the third letter of the alphabet. My companions, four French commercial travellers, relapse into silence and doze off into fitful starts of the sleepiness begot of extreme cold; the fifth—a grandee of Castile I take him to be at the very least by his appearance, broad swarthy countenance, shaven upper lip and chin, and short spade whiskers of a night-black—the fifth, this Spaniard, did not relapse into silence, for he had never uttered a word since we started.

What weariness to the flesh is this tedious climb to regions hyperborean! I catch myself yawning. What if our waggon were to break down! At last one of the Frenchmen bursts out, "Dieu de Dieu, j'en ai assez." He would stand or rather sit it no longer, opened the door, and alighted. We all followed his example, even to the taciturn Spaniard, and took to the road. A walk in advance might send the blood circulating, and on we plodded in the middle of the path, regardless of the snow which soaked into our boots and saturated our trousers to the knees. Not a living being was visible but two crows who bore us company, and hopped on our flanks like a covering-party. The road was tantalizing in its tortuousness; after walking a furlong we found ourselves a couple of yards directly above the point we had quitted a quarter of an hour before. One of the Frenchmen, seeing this, had an inspiration; he determined to go up the mountain perpendicularly, and before we could dissuade him he had sunk to his armpits in a treacherous crevasse. We dragged him out by making a cable of our pocket-handkerchiefs and throwing it to him. He took his wetting in good part.

"Ah!" he cried, "shan't I have something to tell them when I get back to the Boulevard des Italiens." And then, as if reflecting, he added, "But no, 'twill never do; they'd call me farceur."

A red-brick building with an arrangement of iron on the roof, as if it had been employed as a signal-post, faced us—high up on the pinnacle of a ridge at one moment; was at our side the next; behind us anon; and directly before us now. By turns it was small and large. We were asking ourselves (all except the Spaniard; he never spoke) was this a phantasmagoria, when a jingle of bells was heard on the still air. Where did it come from? We could see nothing. Suddenly, as a theatrical ghost springs from a trap-door, at an abrupt turn a wild figure appears bearing right down upon us. A Carlist chieftain? Not so fast. A muleteer simply, sitting sideways on his prad, and leading a half-dozen mules laden with panniers in Indian file behind him. He told us we had reached the summit, and that there was a fonda a short distance off. Signs of life multiplied; we met mountaineers, with oxen drawing small cars with solid wheels similar to those of toy carriages—wheels that kept up perpetual creak and croak—and finally we encountered the caravan from Alsasua to Beasain. But we encountered no Carlists, that is, no armed Carlists, for every man there is Carlist in soul. The smoky fonda was as miserable as the most miserable of Irish shebeens; yet they gave us good white bread and eggs to eat, and, with the aid of the sauce of hunger and sundry glasses of acid Val de Peñas to wash it down, we made a hearty meal. The caravan overtook us in half an hour; the rest of the journey was downhill, the snow was deeper than on the other side, and the jolting terrific, but we did not care. Our goal was near, and we had eaten and drunk. We laughed at the dangers we had passed, and even the Spaniard unbent and exhibited unexpected powers of conversation. Alas! for my judgment; he was no grandee of Castile, but a butcher from Saragossa, a mere carnifex with blood of the common red tint.

At Alsasua we came upon a village bleaker than Beasain, with soldiers billeted under every roof. They loitered in twos and threes about the wide street, which was drab with patches of dirty snow. Here were placed a few mountain guns under custody of a shivering sentry, there a bugler in slovenly greatcoat blew some call with pinched lips on a battered instrument. At the station—a rude shanty with wooden partitions and a plank erection run up as refreshment-stall—some attempt had been made at fortification. There were mud-works thrown up in its vicinity, and the walls were roughly loop-holed. A party of Linesmen were in possession. On a siding close by was the locomotive which had been riddled with shot by the insurgents on the now disused line to Pampeluna. Our own locomotive was awaiting us, with steam up, and I hurried to procure my ticket. I pushed a piece of honest red gold through the wicket, and an extremely nice, slim female clerk gave me the pasteboard with my change and thanks. Something struck me in the silver shoved towards me; the leaden hue of the pesetas was suspicious. I took up one and rung it; the dull sound convinced me it was bad. I rung another—same result. I was desolate; but I had to call the attention of the extremely nice girl to the error she had fallen into; and she coolly, without adumbration of a blush, or faintest pretence at apology, took back the base coins, and gave me their equivalent in coins that were sterling. And then, for the first time, it broke upon me, that it was not considered a scoundrelly act to pass bad money upon an innocent foreigner, or upon an innocent native, for the matter of that. I further learned that if I had removed that bad money from the counter, I should have had to bear with the loss. That extremely nice girl would have assured me with all politeness that I must be labouring under an illusion.

The Spaniard has personal dignity to a prodigious degree. But his personal dignity does not hinder the ordinary Spaniard from endeavouring to foist counterfeit stamps upon his neighbour whenever he has the chance.

The tarantara of a bugle stirred a company of soldiers to take their places in the train. They were our escort to Miranda, on the borders of Old Castile, where we might consider ourselves out of danger. It is my opinion we were never in any danger.

We reached Miranda safely, and from that swept down in the darkness to Madrid without molest, the most of us snoring as regularly as the funnel of the engine snorted. I had a fearsome vision of a sweet Spanish maiden who had knowingly placed a worthless peseta in the tirelire at Mass, and had been sentenced by Santa Cruz to grill on the gridiron of hell for the term of her natural life. A carpet-bag utilized as a pillow was the origin of my vision. Had that carpet-bag been more carelessly packed, the penalty on the poor girl might have been prolonged to eternity.

CHAPTER IV.

Madrid—The Fonda and its Porter—The Puerta del Sol—Postal Irregularities—Tribute to the Madrileños—The Barber's Pronunciamiento—Anecdotes of King Amadeus—Checkmating the Grand Dames—Queen Isabella—The Embarrassed Mr. Layard of Nineveh—The Great Powers Hesitate—America Goes Ahead—General Sickles—Mahomet and the Mountain—Republicanism among the troops—A Peculiar Pennsylvanian Dentist—Castelar under Torture—The Writer meets one of his Sept—Politicians by Trade—Honour among Insurgents—Alonso the Reckless.

FIRST impressions of Madrid, "the only court," do not fill the visitor with awe. It is an aggregate of masonry, fragmentary on the edges, compact in the middle, on a sandy plateau in a waste of arid landscape. There is lack of natural shade and water, albeit there are tree-planted walks and gardens, with cedars and Himalayan pines, and fountains with fulness of clear flow are abundant. It wants a river; the Manzanares, I am told, is but a ditch. I do not know if that is so; I never could see the Manzanares. A rugged, sun-blistered city, Madrid struck me as no more characteristically Spanish—or what I had taught myself to accept as such—than Turin is Italian; both are half-Frenchified. In the northern distance are the summits of the Guadarrama hills, and the unseen breeze which sweeps down from its snowy eyries amongst them cuts like an icicle. The Madrileño fears it, for it has a trick of permeating the streets with a subtile, chilling, killing breath; and when the Madrileño steps from the sunny to the shady side of the street he is careful to lift a corner of his cloak as screen to his mouth.

The central point of Madrid is the Puerta del Sol—a bare, broad, irregular area off which nine thoroughfares diverge. Round it the day-god, greatest friend of Spain, pivots in glory. Now he floods one side with radiance, now he drops his cloth of gold over another. The Puerta del Sol is the focus of interest for the population. Thither the gossips repair, and there the affairs of the nation are discussed very often by those who have acted, act, or hope to act as leaders of the nation. Naturally I made for the Puerta del Sol, for it was of vital importance to me to be in the movement, in the very vortex of the pool. I was fortunate. I got rooms in the Fonda de Paris, an hotel at the corner of the Calle de Alcalá, the principal avenue leading from the Plaza. As proof of the unsettled condition of affairs and its effect upon trade, it need only be said that at the table d'hôte of this, the first hotel in the capital, where one hundred and thirty persons usually sit down to dinner, there were sometimes not more than fifteen or twenty, and a proportion of these were fly-about Special Correspondents. Yet in this exiguous circle of prudent people who were detained in Madrid, or foolhardy people who had travelled there, turned up the irrepressible British tourist. Of the latter class we had charming specimens at dinner one evening in two English girls, with fresh peachy complexions, and hair like wavy masses of ripe maize. They had no guide but their faithful "Murray." What became of them subsequently I never ascertained; but it is to be trusted they were as lucky as the enterprising young lady who relied on Erin's honour and Erin's pride in the reign of King Brian, and made the tour of the Emerald Isle with a gold ring on the tip of a wand. That would hardly pay the hotel-bills nowadays.

A great feature in the fonda was Constantine, the hall-porter, a tall swarthy man, who was as fluent a linguist as an Alexandria dragoman. He was Greek by birth, but had a strain of English blood on the mother's side. His sire may have been a South Sea cannibal or a South African lion-slayer for aught I remember; but that there was something phenomenally bold in him I am certain. Constantine's instincts were predatory, and his manners morose. There was a tradition that he had been a bandit in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, or an innkeeper by the Marseilles docks—much about the same thing, and that he was prepared to do little jobs of human carving for a consideration. However, these may have been fables got up by travellers in search of excitement to invest Constantine with an interesting air of romance. He was very civil to me and did not cheat me more than I chose. I never had occasion to ask him to kill anybody.

From my windows I could command the mid-basin in the Plaza, more for use than ornament, and as great a rendezvous of the quidnuncs as a village-pump. The panorama of life lounged or moved or bustled beneath—shifting groups of cloaked disputants, veiled women tripping gracefully along, stately Civil Guards in three-cornered hats, sombre priests with Don Basilio head-gear, the various moulds of human nature from the grandee to the mendicant, and above all that brood with which I soon grew familiar, and for which I conceived an invincible disgust—the sallow, peering, prating, importunate brood of hungry place-hunters, impatient to dip their fingers into the Government pie. Cabriolets passed to and fro, tram-cars with such sleek well-conditioned mule-teams jolted on the rails; here a horse-soldier trotted by with clattering accoutrements, there a water-carrier sturdily trudged; and in a sheltered angle a long-locked vendor of a magic hair-restorer vaunted his wondrous balm in sonorous patter, and occasionally curtained his face with his thick mane brought over from his back as tangible testimony to the fertilizing properties of the balm. In short, from those windows I could take in the cardiac pulsing of Madrid. Below me, as I sat and smoked my cigarette, the beginning of change or crux, accident or riot, the initial whims or humours of the populace, the formation of a procession or the overture of a pronunciamiento, were within my ken. And at one corner of the Puerta were the General Post Office and Telegraphic Bureau, a matter of great convenience to me, if only they were properly managed. However, it was far easier to collect news than to send it to the desired destination. The post was as unsafe as in those days in another land when Mr. Richard Turpin, highwayman, and his comrogues intercepted his Majesty's mails. As for messages by wire, I was not long in learning that no important information was allowed to be sent; true, the money for its transmission was taken, but—delayed, or forwarded, or suppressed even—the strict rule in that establishment was "no money returned." Vain were complaints. The Special Correspondent had no resource but that of the negro suffering from toothache; 'twas his to grin and bear it. The idea of ever again seeing the colour of the coin which has passed into the palm of a Spanish functionary is laughable in its pastoral innocence. As well expect to handle last year's snow. The system of ignorant espionage still obtained in the Peninsula, as I was forced reluctantly to observe: the word "Cuba" or "Carlos" on the telegraphic form at once aroused the scruples and suspicions of the official, and led to the confiscation of the message. In the end, I discovered how to facilitate the despatch of news; but as that is my secret I keep it to myself. Suffice it that in my bill of expenses the item "sundries" was elastic.

There are some valuable guide-books to Spain, and to them I refer the reader if he desire to be crammed with curious knowledge about churches and picture-galleries, museums of arms, and the beautiful upholstery of the Duke of Sixty-Blazons' palace. My behest was with living not dead Spain, as investigated during the throes of a political convulsion. I made my notes on the Madrileños without bias, and without bias I give them. I spent five weeks in constant and free intercourse with all classes of the inhabitants. During that time I did not detect one Belleville face; I did not catch the glitter of a knife except at a dinner-table, nor remark a single drunkard staggering along the streets. Yet I was in every quarter of the town, to the lowest, at all hours. There are parts of London where the foreign visitor could not penetrate and come back with the same story. The Madrileños are indolent—granted; but they are frugal, temperate, and well-conducted. Occasionally a poniard is slipped into the ribs of an enemy, but mistakes will occur in the best-regulated families. If this be a vindictive and blood-sucking people, the vampirism is adroitly concealed; the dirty linen must be washed in the dark corner where the charcoal is stored, so that Paul Pry may not be gratified with the sight. There is no working population at Madrid; there are no large manufactories, no thriving centres of employment. That is one reason why Madrid is orderly compared to other and livelier cities. Prosperous Barcelona swarms with mechanics and artisans, and that is one reason why Barcelona is disorderly. The rights-of-man agitators generally find favour there. The International has its ramifications in the Catalonian capital. In Madrid, the International is a pigmy failure. Its emissaries came once and laboured zealously to stir up the son of toil to a proper consciousness of his dignity. After months of propagandism they succeeded in persuading Figaro to shake a rebellious pole and fiercely flourish his lathering-brush.

"Know, ye smooth-lipped minions of the despot Capital," quoth the barbers in an indignant round-robin, "we shall no longer submit to the gross tyranny of shaving you before eight of the morning!"

But Figaro was defeated; Madrid let its beard grow.

The sudden departure of the Italian-bred monarch had apparently plunged the politicians into a pit of bewilderment. They did not know how they stood. Amadeus after his reign of five-and-twenty months had perchance left few partisans behind him, but assuredly no enemies. His principal fault, but that was fatal, consisted in his being a foreigner. It was universally vouchsafed that he was very brave, a true hidalgo in that respect, and if he had been removed in the orthodox method by revolution or the assassin, his name would have been garlanded with rosemary for remembrance. But Spanish pride was nettled to the quick at the cavalier way he had tossed back, with a shrug of the shoulders, the gift of a crown when he had tired of it. He had looked upon the throne of Castile as a gewgaw to be surrendered with indifference, and steamed contentedly to Italy to enjoy his comparatively obscure Dukedom and rank of General in preference. He had chosen the wiser and happier part, but to those he had abandoned it was mortifying in the extreme. Still, he was an unquailing chevalier, almost fit to be a Spaniard, this son of Victor Emmanuel. He had disarmed hostility, and compelled the praise of the envious, the very day he entered Madrid, forty-eight hours after the funeral of Prim, when he spurred ahead of his escort and offered his breast undismayed to the aim of any or all assassins.

That entry of Amadeus could not have inspired him with much of the buoyancy of a bright expectation. There was in it more of sanguinary suggestiveness than sanguine hope. The ghostly presence at the King's first dinner in the palace could not be denied—that of the slaughtered "Paladino," no longer fiery and strenuous, but a figure, inert, waxen, blood-bolstered, a bullet-riddled flesh-target It was most unpropitious of entries. There was an odour of cerecloth in the tapestry, the yellow hue of immortelles in the épergnes, a sediment of bitterness in the wine-cup, a strain of melancholy in the music. And yet there was some semblance of gaiety, for with all his austere stateliness your Spaniard is very like unto the Irishman:

There were sundry plots to take the life of Amadeus, but Providence protected him, and he made it a point, after each attempt or threat, to show himself in public with the ostentation of a reckless courage. He rode or walked about with a single aide-de-camp, which was a crime with those monarchists who set store by the pageantry of state. On one occasion, as he was returning to the palace, the horse in a hackney-coach with a fat bourgeois inside took fright, and started off at break-neck speed, overtaking the King's carriage. The King's coachman whipped up his team, but the wheels of the two vehicles had locked in each other, and the horses galloped frantically side by side. The aide-de-camp, fearing a new and daring experiment in regicide, snatched his rapier from the sheath and began furiously prodding through the window of the hackney-coach. The fat bourgeois shrunk and flattened himself into a corner, drew in his breath, and dodged the lunges of the searching steel. When the palace-gates were reached, and the animals were stopped, the unfortunate citizen was extricated from his hazardous position more dead than alive. He was glistening with the wetness of fright, trembled like an aspen, and blubbered as he begged for mercy. The panelling was pierced, and the cushion ripped into rags; but by some extraordinary luck the poor man, who was a harmless dealer in provisions, had escaped without a scratch. But he owned that he never before had five minutes of such violent exercise complicated with vile terror. During the scene Amadeus kept his seat tranquilly, and relaxed into a smile as he discovered the mistake of his too-zealous companion.

The conspiracies of the saloons were more successful, as efforts to annoy without contravening law always are. They are not so readily met. And the malicious ingenuity of woman, when she lays herself out to be offensive, is remarkably inventive and diabolically persistent. Some of the grand dames of Madrid had the impish inspiration to put the Royal couple into Coventry. There is a fashionable carriage-drive in the capital corresponding much to ours between Hyde Park Corner and Queen's Gate. Whenever Amadeus and his spouse went there for an airing, the blue-blooded of the opposition significantly trotted off. Once an immense procession of the aristocratic families made its appearance, and slowly and perseveringly "took the dust." Such a turn-out of gala equipages had not been witnessed for years. All the ladies were arrayed in the ancient Spanish costume; the fan and veil with high comb and carnation in the hair in every case replaced the Parisian bonnet and parasol. It was a protest against the foreign dynasty, and was clearly meant as a demonstration of insult. One of the Royal household was equal to the provocation; whether Spaniard or Italian I am not sure, but the latter I think, so subtle was his revenge. He went round to all the houses of ill-fame in the capital that night, and entered into conversation, burnished with duros, with their female occupants. The next evening Madrid was afforded the spectacle in its most fashionable drive of a parade of courtesans, in ancient Spanish costumes, fanning themselves, and smirking at their acquaintances from the vantage of luxurious chariots. It was a scandal, but Madrid grinned, and the patricians of the antediluvian stem confessed themselves beaten.

There was still a lingering fondness for the deposed Isabella among the lower orders. They looked upon her as a good sort, one of the old stock, prayerful, and affable. She was accustomed to enter wayside cabins, and get into homely chat with the peasants. The Italian woman never did that. Alphonse Daudet's description of Isabella as a stout queen, who by her massive jaws and high complexion resembled a coarse-rinded blood-orange, would not be endorsed by these humble yearners after the bygone. Indeed, they regarded her as one who had been a type of beauty in her time, and was still a type of good-nature, and were forgiving to her peccadilloes, she was so devout. Of course I must not be understood as speaking here of Spanish partisans of the Republican idea. They had no more pity for the creatures tainted with Royalty than the Polynesian for his leprous kinsman—but they were comparatively few.

Great Britain, at that period, was represented by Mr. Austin Layard, and the United States by General Daniel Sickles. The British Envoy was in a dilemma; he did not know how far he would be justified in recognising the newly-proclaimed Republic; if he received visits of ceremonial it would be an unpardonable breach of courtesy not to return them; in short, to use a very graphic locution of the masses, he was waiting to see how the cat jumped, and cheerfully submitted to a diplomatic catarrh which confined him to his room. I went to visit him, when we had an interesting dialogue on some recently exhumed relics of antiquity and exquisite bits of crockery-ware. Mr. Layard impressed me as more taken up with concerns of Nineveh and Wardour Street than of la haute politique. But, as he frankly acknowledged, he was not free to act until he had received his instructions from Downing Street. Though there is no written pact to the effect, the rule is that Russia, Germany, Austria—the Great Powers in short—shall only act in conjunction, and after having exchanged confidential notes, when eventualities arise affecting all their interests, such as this in Madrid; and—another consideration besides—was there really any Government yet? It was only provisional. It could hardly be supposed that any of the Great Powers would refuse to bow to the will of the Spanish people; but what was its will? That was a question that could not be admitted to be definitely settled.

The United States had struck the key-note—had recognised the infant Republic, while the Prime Minister, Señor Figueras, was waiting for the chorus of acclamation from the "robust voices" of those Great Powers which deliberate before they act. The United States are a fast-trotting buggy; but these Great Powers in this miserable, played-out old Continent are slow coaches. Not that there were not deliberations in the White House before General Sickles was authorized to use his discretionary power in signing the baptismal certificate of this Republic of accident. General Sickles was undoubtedly clever; he had experience in his time as a journalist, an advocate, and a soldier. It was his opinion that Spain had found in the Republic the means of establishing her power and prosperity on a solid basis. During the crisis, he kept his Government informed of what was passing, and to his demand transmitted by cable in the dawn of Wednesday, the 14th of February, an answer was returned within twenty hours, permitting him to exercise his judgment as he thought proper. He imagined that a Federal Republic, on the pattern of that of the United States, with provincial legislatures in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and so on, and a National Congress in Madrid, was the panacea for the ills of Spain, and that that would be sufficient to dissolve all antagonisms of race, custom, and feeling, and amalgamate them into one accordant patriotic sentiment. The General was over-hopeful in the estimation of others, who knew Spain as well as he; but he acted rightly according to his views, and ably according to his gifts—only it was to be hoped the General would use his influence to dissuade his Government from offending its friends and brothers of Spain by proposing anew a transaction that would lead to the abandonment of Cuba—an awkward mission with which he was once charged. Surely if a diplomatic representative could quietly talk the influential personages of the nation to which he was accredited into a zeal for the abolition of slavery in Porto Rico, he could quietly talk the influential personages of his own nation into letting Spanish territory alone. A pompous man this American Minister, active, talkative, and on cordial terms with himself. He hobbled about on his cork leg, leaning on the arm of his handsome Spanish wife, the second. There was a legend in Madrid that the General had lost his limb in a duel about a lady; there had been a question of petticoats in his career once, but it never entered into the minds of those simple Madrileños that a soldier without a breastful of decorations might have been wounded, as he had been, on the battle-field.

The United States were friendly; but France, Republican France, what was she doing? Why did she delay to move? She, at least, ought to have had some fellow-feeling for another Republic without Republicans. The truth was, M. Thiers could not come to any decision without consulting his Council of Ministers. His action was not quite so unfettered as that of President Grant. This was the more to be regretted that Señor Olózaga recognised the Republic of mob acclamation—that of the 4th September, 1870, in Paris—without hesitation. The same compliment was felt by Spaniards to be due to the Republic of accident.

On the 20th of February, Señor Castelar took a course that might give a galvanic shock to the world of diplomats, but which was worthy of a bold Republican prophet. Since the mountain would not come to Mahomet, Mahomet went to the mountain. In plainer words—but has not one an excuse for being figurative when speaking of Señor Castelar?—the Minister for Foreign Affairs determined to take the bull by the horns (pardon this figure for the sake of its aptness in Spain). The representatives of the Great Powers did not call on him; he called on them. His coy advances were met with frigid politeness. A Madrid paper asserted that "an important and friendly conference" had been held between the Minister and Mr. Layard, which, to say the least, was a suggestio falsi. Mr. Layard, as an English gentleman, could not but have received his visitor in a friendly manner; but he kept within the strict line of his very delicate duties with a studious discretion. Señor Castelar saw plainly that events had not prepared the way and made straight the path of the new Republic towards recognition. The Great Powers could not be found fault with, if they were slow to admit to the brotherhood of nations a Republic which had already exhibited within its fortnight's existence what may be literally called two dictatures (those of Señores Rivero and Martos), the abdication of power by a majority, two provisional and two "permanent" Governments, a cabinet of conciliation, and a cabinet of homogeneity, not to mention a round of permutations in the civil governorships of Madrid, and the captain-generalcy of New Castile, and in the commands of the armies of the North and Catalonia.

From the country poured in felicitations to the Republic from hamlet and city, tumid with a rampant joy. These documents emphatically protested that the majority of the population was Republican. Yet talk confidentially to any Spaniard, not actually a Republican propagandist, and not one of the ignorant lower classes of the towns—an average, intelligent, middle-class Spaniard—and he would tell you there were no Republicans in Spain. The thorough frankness with which Spaniards speak of their own country, its divisions and its national faults, is phenomenal. "We are very foolish," they own with a charming candour, but the foreigner had better not chime in with them. They will fire up in an instant. If they are foolish, it is no business of his; Spanish quarrels are conducted precisely on the principles of those between man and wife. The outsider who interposes in them must be prepared to wipe a bloody nose.

But the doctrines of Republicanism were producing their effects in the army nevertheless, and the first of these was a tendency to demoralization. The troops at Barcelona fraternized with the working men, and raised cries for the Republic and for their own liberation from service. They desired individual as well as national independence. In that they were but logical. The Republicans out of power inveighed against standing armies as a monstrosity, a relic of effete Monarchical tyranny. The argument was now used against the Republic; the bird of freedom was menaced by a shaft plumed from her own wing. If discipline were once generally relaxed in the army, which is the salt of Spain, then farewell security and come chaos. That was the chief peril in the way. A man, in the highest meaning of the word, one born to command, was wanted to save the country. He was looked for in vain. Prim had left no successor.

In forming my opinions on Spain and the Spaniards, I was aided not a little by the good offices of a shrewd but eccentric American dentist, named Maceehan, who had left Pennsylvania at so remote a date that nobody could recollect it. Long as he had been absent from his native country, he retained its accent, its peculiarities, and evergreen patriotism, and on each recurring 4th of July gave a lavish banquet in honour of American Independence in a restaurant decked with star-spangled banners, and had the privilege of making all the magnates of the capital, soldiers, ministers, courtiers, nobles, poets, and painters, clink their glasses as he sang "Yankee Doodle." Long as he had been in Madrid, he could not speak Spanish correctly, and his mistakes fed the clubs with side-splitting anecdotes. He was the soul of hospitality, and garrulous as a jay. He was in the secrets of the wire-workers, and had a novel process of extracting information as he extracted teeth. As his patient sat in the chair of torture he plied him slyly with interrogatories, and learned what he wanted, but he never betrayed confidences. In his way he was as proud as the proudest Spaniard of them all. Emilio Castelar came to him once with an agonizing toothache. Maceehan laid hold of the offending fang with his forceps. Castelar shrieked and clutched at his hand.

"You have got the wrong tooth!"

"Caramba!" said the Pennsylvanian, lowering his instrument. "So you have come here to teach me my business. I will thank you to leave the room, señor."

"I beg a thousand pardons, but consider the pain. Do with me as you like, dear doctor."

"The dear doctor in that case will adjourn the operation till to-morrow. By that time the señor may have discovered that though the dear doctor may not be an adept at literature or administration, he has some skill at pulling teeth."

And Castelar, in spite of his apologies and entreaties and plaints, had to accept the penance of four-and-twenty hours. He could not think of going anywhere else, for Maceehan was master of his profession. There was not a set of artificial grinders in Madrid with which the American was not familiar. He had looked into the mouths of every Infante and Infanta, had lanced the gums of awful Captains-General, and inserted gold wires in the ivory treasures of most of the reigning beauties. He had been dentist by appointment to Isabella, and had care of the mâchoire of the lovely Eugenia de Montijo in her maidenhood. The very thought of sipping a cup of tea in the intimacy of a man who had fingered the palate of a Cardinal, plugged the hollow in a Queen's molar, and arrested the manifestation of caries in the central incisor of an Empress, was too much. It was oppressive.

I was amply provided with letters of introduction at starting, but I was in no hurry to present them. It was fortunate for me. Those who were in power to-day were in disgrace to-morrow, and vice versâ, and most of those to whom I had credentials were leaders of parties. One non-politician, a scion of my own sept, but no relative, I did call upon, as funds were to be forwarded to me through his agency. A pleasant old man, he had a brogue as Irish as the canavaun of the Bog of Allen, although he had quitted Ireland in early childhood—a mellow, musical, unctuous brogue. What a sovereign contempt he had for fomenters of revolution, intriguers, and the drones who buzzed while others worked, and wanted to be rewarded for buzzing!

"Namesake," he said, "if you knew the mean secret motives of half these wretched politicians by trade, you would spit upon them. There was but one man fit to govern this nation."

I forget whom he mentioned, but it was a Marshal (Narváez, I fancy), who, when asked on his death-bed by his father-confessor, Did he forgive his enemies? answered that he had none—he had shot them all.

"There may be nothing serious here for the present," he continued, "and yet one can't tell; but I think they will go on shilly-shallying and tinkering up constitutions for months to come."

"Then I should have a better field for my labours in the Carlist country."

"Undoubtedly; but if you think of going there, you must cut off that yellowish-red beard or they will call you Judas Iscariot. Do you speak Basque?"

"No; but as to the beard, I am equal to the sacrifice of shaving it and dying my moustache."

"Ah, yes; you may do that sure enough, but it is not so easy to learn Basque!"

If I could not learn Basque I could learn of the Basques, and what I did learn was so much to their credit that it is only fair to write it down. They were not Thugs, they were neither sanguinary nor thievish. The peasantry of the Basque provinces are the finest in Spain—intelligent, hospitable, brave, gentle, but fiercely fanatical where religion is concerned. Instances were narrated to me of travellers who had been arrested by them, being liberated without damage to person or detriment to purse. In one case a Frenchman was robbed by a small party, but his money and papers were restored to him a few days after by one of the chiefs, with an apology. The correspondent of the Temps, who accompanied the army in a previous Carlist campaign, informed me that after a skirmish in which forty Carlists were captured, he was anxious to send an account of the affair to Paris, but he did not know how.

"Hold!" said a colonel, "I'll find you the means."

He called over a prisoner, and asked him if he were let off on parole, would he take a letter through the disturbed district, and post it on the other side for a French gentleman? The man pleaded fatigue.

"You'll be well paid."

At last he consented; my informant gave him the letter and a five-franc piece. While monsieur was searching his pockets for more money to give him, the prisoner said:

"I have no change, caballero; how shall we manage?"

The prisoner duly set off; the letter was duly posted and duly arrived, and the prisoner faithfully returned and delivered himself up. Honour is not yet extinct in the Basque provinces, nor is magnanimity in the Spanish army. The commandant dismissed the peasant with a look of admiration and a push on the back. But some fireside philosopher will argue:

"Why, these honourable fellows cut telegraph wires and fire on railway trains."

The Carlists explain: "The telegraph and the railway are our greatest enemies; the one sends for reinforcements, the other brings them."

The unfortunate station-masters are to be pitied. Lizárraga sends one word that he will incur the penalty of death if he makes up a train for troops. The troops arrive, their commander demands to be furnished with a train to take him to a certain point; if the station-master refuses he is not merely threatened with the death-penalty, but incurs it on the spot. But the fireside philosophers, assuming the cocked-hat of the general, will continue:

"Why not protect the telegraphs and the railways?" The query may be met, more Hibernico, by another:

Do the philosophers know how enormous and difficult an extent of country has to be protected?

It would take more men than there are in the Spanish army altogether, including the regiment of dismissed generals in Madrid, to act as military milesmen in the perturbed territory. The Army of the North did what it could—that is to say, it fortified the railway stations, converting them into veritable block-houses, and supplied escorts to the trains; but the Carlists had an unpurchasable ally in the darkness. They could come down in the night and play old Harry with metals and wires. The insurgents were ill-armed and undisciplined, but they were on their own ground, every square inch of which they knew; they were leal to each other, and they had acquired the secret of guerrilla campaigning—that is, they harassed the regulars by fighting and running away, so that they might live to fight another day. They avoided concentration in mass, knowing how dangerous it is to pack all one's eggs in a single basket.

So daring had these Carlists become that bands had made demonstrations in perilous nearness to the capital, or rather they had been organized in the capital itself and had taken to the field in the neighbourhood. From a rising ground hard by the palace could be distinguished with the naked eye a thicket on the desolate plain in the distance, where the remnants of one band were known to be hiding. The fates were against the insurgents, as they were met at Buendia and badly beaten two days after they had unfurled the banner of revolt. Eleven of them were slain, including a priest, twenty wounded and one hundred and seventeen taken prisoners, including their two chiefs. The elder of these, Alonso, a man of three-score and ten, died in the military hospital of Madrid on the 19th of March. He was a venerable fanatic of asinine stupidity to have risked a fight with regular troops in the open. Fortune, in my experience, favours not so much the brave as the wary. Had this particular Alonso the brave, really an Alonso the reckless, availed himself of a few picks and spades—the first farmhouse will seldom fail to supply entrenching tools—he might have lived to die in his own bed of a natural disease.

CHAPTER V.

A Late Capital—The Gambling Mania—A French Rendezvous—The Duke de Fitzpepper—The Morality of Passing Bad Money—Spanish Compliments—Men in Pickle—A Licentious Ballet—Federal Manners—Prim's Artifice—Nouvilas Goes North—A Carlist Proclamation—Don Alfonso—Midnight Oil—Castelar's Circular.

MADRID is not an early capital—natural effect of the climate. In the middle of the day the blinds are let down, the shops are shut, the streets are empty—everybody who can at all manage it is taking the siesta. The business of sunlight is at a standstill. The few hours thus stolen from the day are religiously made restitution of to the night, which is undoubtedly the most agreeable period for a stroll. Pleasure is in full swing, the promenades are alive, flirtation is methodically practised in the Spanish way—that is, through an intervening lattice—theatres and ball-rooms contribute to the programme of diversion, the coffee-houses (where chocolate is mostly consumed) are packed to the door-posts, and the business of gaslight is prosecuted with a desperate concentration of energy and a brooding perseverance.

The business of gaslight, unfortunately, is high play. That is one of the social curses of Spain. Everybody gambles, to the sentries in the guard-house, the patients in the hospitals, the felons in the gaols. Such is the overwhelming dominion of this national passion that I should not be surprised at reading of a condemned man on his way to the garrote craving a hand of cards with the executioner to distract him from his sorrows. Strained the situation was at this crisis, and in all the clubs the cards were thrown on the tables with a fever as of men seeking some relaxation from the fierce game of politics; but, as I had opportunity to assure myself afterwards, this was nothing exceptional. The fever for play as high as the pocket can allow, often higher, is normal. The foreigner—and all foreigners provided with the slightest credentials are most graciously made free of the clubs—soon takes note of that.

The Fornos, the Suizo, and other coffee-houses were transformed into debating-forums, and sometimes I frequented them to catch what was going on; but my haunt of predilection was a restaurant patronized by French refugees. They had brought with them the Gaulish gaiety, and it was instructive to see Communists, fugitive aristocrats, bagmen with the asphalte of the boulevards still clinging to the soles of their boots, and steady old settlers in Madrid foregathering in friendly forgetfulness of differing shades of political coats. One of the three Marquesses de Fonvielle and de Coutuly, of the Temps, amongst other journalists, used to drop in regularly. De Coutuly has since strayed into diplomacy. Touching journalists who wander into that luxurious labyrinth, the representative of the New York Herald, at Madrid, a painstaking gentleman with a certain cleverness, Russell Young, subsequently became United States' Minister to China. Prizes of this class, which rain upon Continental and American publicists, seldom fall to the lot of their brethren of the British press, unless they get into Parliament or boldly single themselves out from the anonymous herd. Then they are sometimes promoted to a Consulship in an insalubrious region, where they have every facility for studying the manners of the buck-nigger, and the customs of the lively sand-fly. Far and away the most interesting customer of this restaurant was the Duke de Fitzpepper, a tall, dark, strong man with curly black hair, a boisterous voice, and a bold laugh. He had to quit France on account of an affair of honour. He had been in the Imperial Navy, had a squabble with his captain, and resigned his commission that he might send him a challenge. They met with the customary duelling swords, but de Fitzpepper made a mistake. He ran his antagonist through. I know naught of the merits of the quarrel, but to my insularly uneducated mind it appeared that the gallant nobleman experienced inadequate remorse at having the blood of a fellow-creature on his soul. Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive, but when de Fitzpepper used to boast "Je me connais dans le flingot," it sent a thread of cold water creeping down my spine, not from fear but from aversion. Yet it was impossible to keep aloof from him for long, he was such a joyous, dashing, carry-your-outworks pattern of a musketeer.

Evil associations corrupt good manners, I suppose, which must be the excuse for a Frenchman with whom I entered into conversation in this mirthful caravanserai. I happened to show him a coin which had been passed upon me, an escudo, which would be worth a sovereign if it were not counterfeit.

"What a shame!" he exclaimed as he fingered it. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's useless to me."

"Lend it to me, pray."

I gave it to him, and the following night he asked me what commission I would allow him. He had passed the bad escudo in his turn. I was indignant, and accused him of having been guilty of a dishonest act. I would touch none of the proceeds of his crookedness.

"Nonsense!" he said, astonished. "I got rid of it in a hell. They're all rogues there when they have a chance."

I submit to the casuists that this was a very nice case of conscience. Winning money at cards is not earning it. He who seeks to win it is demoralized, and it is to his advantage and the advantage of society that he should be discouraged in his pernicious foolishness. Therefore, q.e.d., it was commendable to palm that base coin upon him. I was unequal to deciding the question off-hand, so I elected to take not a real of the Frenchman's equivocal profit. But if the Frenchman was to blame, was I not responsible in the first instance, as having afforded him the means of cheating his neighbour? When the casuists shall have elucidated this riddle to their satisfaction, perhaps they will oblige by telling me how many thousand angels could alight on the point of a needle.

Morality is at a low ebb in Madrid, or rather the moral code is regulated by notions peculiar to the latitude. So with habits. A man must be "native and to the manner born," before he can affect competency to interpret them. For example, when a Madrileño asseverates that his house is yours, or that his equipage which you so much admire is at your disposal, he does not intend that you should take up your residence with him there and then, or hold his coachman at your beck. It is simply a form of etiquette, a mode of speech, as of the Englishman of past generations who challenged you to mortal combat and subscribed himself "your obedient humble servant." You will be guilty of a grave solecism if you imitate that American to whom the grandee remarked with effusion that the stud which captivated his taste was his own, his very own.

"Thanks," said Brother Jonathan; "I'll take the roan and the chestnut to-day and call for the others to-morrow!"

Although a man may tender you fraudulent coinage with a brazen front, he may be keen in honour, and resent an insult to his sister with a knife-stab; although he may intrigue for a Government place with a slimy self-abasement, under circumstances the same being may go forth unflinchingly and sacrifice himself on the altar of his country. Spain is the home of paradox. The beggar is addressed as "your worship," mutiny is a venial offence, bribery of officials is a recognised prescription. At the very epoch of which I write, the murderers of Prim were stalking about the capital; it was a town-crier's secret who they were and who was the personage who was their employer, yet none had the temerity to denounce them. And in the saladero, or the "salting-tub," as the prison was called, it was notorious that there were malefactors who gave lessons in forgery, and who positively utilized their cells as convenient head-quarters from which to prey on the unwary public. Their plan was to write to somebody of position, whose name they had lighted on in a directory, and inform him that they had often heard speak of him as a citizen of integrity, and felt that they might trust him; they were singularly situated, immured for a debt of a few duros, and yet in the vicinity of his residence they were cognizant of an immense buried treasure; if he would only send them the trifle needful to pay off that debt and cover their fare to his town, they would take him with them to the site of the secret hoard, and repay him with interest for his kindness. This transparent ruse actually told with hundreds of dupes. How the auri sacra fames will deprive sane men of sense! He would be a spendthrift of sympathy who would waste his sympathy upon them.

I had been under the impression that Spain was a deeply religious country. The impression was illusive. It may be fanatically religious in parts, but too often the educated classes rail at religion. As comes to pass when inordinate demand has been made on credulity, a reaction arises, and those whose faith was implicit yesterday become the scoffing heretics of to-day. The tide has turned, and it is no unfrequent occurrence to hear a Spaniard declare he is not a Christian, whose fathers would have perhaps burned at a stake the wretch who would have dared to utter such a profanity. This is very bad. One extreme is as wicked as another. If the Scylla of stupid superstition was dangerous, the Charybdis of arrogant scepticism is destructive. This is essentially a Roman Catholic country, yet never have I seen anywhere, in the lands where Roman Catholicism is disliked and contemned even, the ceremonies and institutions of the Church treated with more undisguised ribaldry. I went to the Novedades, a popular theatre in a humble quarter of the town in the vicinity of the Calle de Toledo, to see what the piece on the occasion, "El Triunfo de la República," was like. I got in as a "Carlist ballet" was being danced; two men were dressed to represent two famous cabecillas, Saballs and a colleague, two others to represent the Carlist priest, Santa Cruz, and a monk of the party. Santa Cruz was bulky as Friar Tuck, leered from under his scoop hat, drank wine, reeled, toddled, fell, and kicked up his heels as the wild Mabille quadrille music was played; and high was the content and noisily expressed the delight of the audience. The four women who took part in the Terpsichorean orgie wore the robes of nuns, and must have belonged to the order of Sisters of Shame, if to any. They had blue hoods, white bands across their foreheads and bosoms, red crosses wrought on their habits, and trailing skirts of white. Their dancing was not voluptuous; it would be a misnomer to let it down with so mild an epithet; it was grossly indecent. They exposed their limbs, and the audience was ecstatic at the sight. Not a murmur of censure was to be heard. And this bacchanalian riot, too obscene for any self-respecting house of ill-fame, was supposed to be held in a church. The scenery showed a mockery of ecclesiastical architecture and pious pictures. As a dramatic effort, "El Triunfo de la República" was very poor. Zorilla was caricatured as a fox (a play upon his name), and Sagasta as a devil-fish, and the apotheosis revealed the Genius of Spain waving a flag lettered with the words, "Viva la República Federal!" The flag was welcomed with vehement cheers, in affirmation that those who looked on and admired the burlesque of ministers of the national faith were all stout Federal Republicans, corresponding somewhat to the Communists of the Paris of two years before.

These Federals, I own, I do not like. A deputation of them from the provinces arrived one of these evenings, and put up at the Fonda de Paris. They were scrubby louts, smoked between the courses although ladies were at table, which, however, could be condoned, as it was Spanish. But they also wore their hats. That irritated one guest, and he called to a waiter to bring him a hat which he would find on a peg outside. Having been handed his head-gear, he clapped it on, and said that was all he wanted. The hint was not lost. The boors dined in a room by themselves during the rest of their stay. And yet these Federal Republicans profess to respect public opinion; but by the phrase must be understood the opinion of those who agree with them. The Intransigentes, on whose support they depend, have arms in their hands, and will try to keep them. Only one man was ever able to disarm them, and he was assassinated. If Prim did not know the Spanish mind intuitively, and as no other man ever knew it, even he would not have succeeded. After the promiscuous distribution of arms to the multitude had been made from the windows of the storehouses in Madrid at the close of 1868, he tried every means to get them back, but to no purpose. Promises of rewards to those who would give up the guns were useless; threats and coaxings were in vain. At last Prim hit on a notable scheme. At a review he publicly insulted the corps he was so long trying to disembody; he either rode past them without noticing them, or made remarks on their appearance the reverse of complimentary. The officers threw up their commissions in dudgeon; they had served the cause of the people faithfully, and were not to be treated with contempt; they would no longer carry arms for such ungrateful friends. It was just what Prim wanted.

While Madrid was thus seething and bubbling as if it were on the verge of boiling over, and the great question of elections for the new Cortes to determine the future "permanent" style of administration was being mooted, the Carlists were plucking up heart and maturing their designs. They fancied they would soon have the nation before them the nudum et cœcum corpus of Sylla's description—defenceless and blind. Nouvilas, one of the numberless generals of Spain, was ordered to the north. At a Republican meeting before his departure, he promised that he would take his five sons with him to fight against the Carlists. At the same meeting he declared himself the uncompromising enemy of all dictatorships, and warned those who expected that he would use his power in that sense not to make a mistake. He was a soldier, not a politician, and the day that the Republic would be consolidated, and peace secured, he would retire into private life. It did not seem as if peace were shortly to be secured. There was a proposition to raise fifty battalions of free corps to crush the insurgents. The only difficulty in the way was the loan for their armaments. The battalions were to be organized by provinces, and each was to be composed of 900 men (making a total of 44,100), and to be officered from the reserve. The proposition of itself was sufficient to wake the fools out of their paradise. These Carlists were not to be underrated. If they could do nothing else, they could issue proclamations. They were great at these. They promised to give the army the "licencia absoluta" which some soldiers demanded from the Republic at Barcelona. One Ramon V. Valcarces, commandant-general of the province of Lugo, was exceedingly anxious that the Galicians should come out to conquer or die. He told them that the national banner of their legitimate King waved triumphantly in the provinces of Catalonia, Castile, Leon, the Asturias, and the Vasco-Navarre, which was a piece of bounce—legitimate, may it be called?—on his part; and added scathingly that the Government at Madrid was in the hands of a group of adventurers, who called themselves Spaniards and Liberals. Those impostors would raise the taxes until it would be impossible to pay them, would sell the Antilles and persecute religion.

Tidings were wafted to us mysteriously that the brother of the legitimate King, H.R.H. Don Alfonso, of Bourbon and Lorraine, had held a review of the forces of Saballs at Vidra, in Catalonia. His Royal Highness was accompanied by his wife, the Doña Maria. His Royal Highness wore flesh-coloured riding breeches with black stripes, jack-boots, a zamarra or sheep-skin upper garment, and a flat white cap of the make of those used by Scotch shepherds. Doña Maria wore a cap of the same kind, with a gold tassel coquettishly falling over her left shoulder. The august pair were mounted, and the lady, who chivalrously accompanied her husband, witched the Carlists with noble horsemanship. Don Alfonso was surrounded by a brilliant staff, conspicuous amongst whom was a son of that Don Enrique of Bourbon who was shot in a duel by the Duke of Montpensier.

The "only court" did not lack a moidering liveliness. Of nights I usually leant by my balcony overlooking the Puerta del Sol, and watched the frail sodality of the Moon prowling about in charge of the superfluous duenna, the while the brawl of palaver, the cries of "água fresca," or of the last edition of the Correspondencia, the "theeah" in such wise cadenced, or the boom of the watchman's voice came floating upwards, before I sat me down to a hard spell of work, sifting grain from chaff, and committing my thoughts to paper, a moistened towel round my temples, and a pot of black coffee at my elbow. The sun was usually ogling the fountain in the Plaza before I had finished.

The burden of work imposed upon the correspondent who desired to be loyal to duty was weighty on occasion. For example, late on the 26th of February the official journal came out with a lengthy circular from Don Emilio Castelar, to the representatives of Spain abroad. The object was to obtain the recognition of the Republic by Powers other than the United States and Switzerland. I saw the importance of sending a translation of this pregnant State paper at once, and shut myself up in my room with a supply of pens, ink, and paper, and the indispensable coffee-pot. I was not an accomplished Spanish scholar, but with the aid of a youthful groundwork in Latin, a fair knowledge of Italian, a familiarity with French, and a dictionary, I succeeded in turning out a full, accurate—nay, I will say a vivid—rendering of this historic composition before I unlocked my door, and transmitted it to London within twelve hours. Spanish is not difficult. If Italian is the daughter of Latin, Spanish is the son. And with energy and mother-wit, one can do much.

Castelar's was a brilliant and sustained effort; but it read more like an essay by Macaulay than a diplomatic holograph. It was splendid, but it was not official. It lacked crispness, and dealt in excessive rhetoric from the phrase in an opening paragraph where it spoke of Spain assuming a place in the Amphictyonic council of Europe, to the closing sentence. The fall of the Monarchy was traced to the hour when the institution solemnly ceded its own country to the foreigner (alluding to the pitiful abdication of Charles IV. in favour of his "friend and ally" Napoleon, at Bayonne in 1808). True, attempts had been thrice made since to revive the old system with a new spirit, but they had failed; in 1812, the Democratic Monarchy; in 1837, the Parliamentary Monarchy; in 1869, the Elective Monarchy. The former order of things disappeared through inherent domestic causes; the Republic appeared of its own virtue, by the law of necessity. In 1869 the Constituent Cortes had proclaimed a Monarchy for three fundamental reasons: firstly, because it corresponded with the traditions of the Spanish people; secondly, because they believed it would secure liberal principles; and thirdly, because it would harmonize their form of government with that existing in nearly every part of Europe. The trouble was where to find the monarch. They had no dynasty typifying religious and national principles united to modern spirit like that of England, no princes like those who had built up the unity of Italy and of Germany on battlefields; their sovereign houses presented no stability. They had to look outside for a king, at the double risk of disturbing the peace of Europe and wounding the national sentiment. They found him in the scion of an illustrious line, united to France by the war of 1859, to Prussia by the war of 1866, to Great Britain by the establishment of parliamentary rule in Italy. But the national sentiment of Spain was against him. It left him in a solitude that was asphyxia. At last he renounced a crown of which he only felt the weight on his brow and not the dignity in his soul. When he left, this Government came not by violent revolution, but by logical evolution. The Republic was not provisional, but definitive. (As if there were any finality in politics!) The Cortes which had proclaimed it were the most permanent estate in the nation, inasmuch as when others melted away they remained. It was the same Cortes which undertook the national defence in the epic years from 1808 to 1814, which abrogated the rights of Don Carlos to the ancient crown, and which sanctioned the dethronement of the Bourbons. Spain owed the change she had effected to no cosmopolitan influences or agitations. She sought autonomy, not Utopianism; she coveted no conquest, but she wished to show that she was living, not dead; that she was still great, but not with the greatness of ruin, like the empires buried under the valleys of Asia.

There was an excellent thickset gentleman in Madrid, a literary pluralist, who combined the offices of "own correspondent" to several London journals. He was a diligent "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," who would never set even the Manzanares on fire. He met me after I had despatched my version of Castelar's circular, and was cooling my aching brain on the shady side of the Puerta del Sol.

"Did you read that thing of 'Musica's'?" he said. ("Musica" was the nickname of the silver-tongued professor-politician.)

"Yes; lovely and long and flimsy as a rainbow," I remarked.

"I think you ought to send an epitome of it to London."

"I shall not."

"Well, I may tell you Chose is sending the whole of it on," he continued.

Chose was a most formidable rival.

"Who translated it for him?" I asked.

"As it is very important I am getting my sons to do it. Indeed, he asked me."

"And you never told me."

"Ah! you see, he has a reputation to sustain."

"And I have a reputation to make."

"I'll let you have a précis to-morrow."

"No, thanks," I answered, turning on my heel.

The thickset gentleman looked mighty blank when he gazed on the paper a few days after with my translation covering nearly two columns of small type, nor did his astonishment lessen when I confided to him that it had been made for me by the Man in the Moon.

CHAPTER VI.

Warning to Ladies—The Hotel Parliament—An Anglo-Spanish Mentor—The Evil Genii of the Monarchy—The Curses of Spain—Government and Religion Affairs of Climate—The Carlists, Norwegians, and English, all Republicans!—Notions on Heredity—The Five Spanish Parties—The Army the Lever of Power—The Student-Cæsar—Order versus Republic—The Chained Colours—Dorregaray's Appeal to the Soldiers—Influence of the Church—Wanted: a Benevolent Despot.

IN the first line, it may be generous to warn ladies (if any of the gentler sex there be among my readers) to skip this chapter. There will be no indelicate disclosures—not that indelicate disclosures would bar the inquisitiveness of some females, judging by the ingenuity with which they intrigue for seats at the trials in the Divorce Court, and the avidity with which they devour "spicy," that is scandalous, details; but matter of a political, speculative, and quasi-philosophical nature is to be discussed, and I fear me much it will be dry and prosy.

A shady little room in one of the upper stories of the Fonda de Paris was used as reading-room. It was thickly carpeted, the walls were covered with oil paintings in massive ornamented frames, and on the tables were placed curious jars, antique candlesticks, bronze statuettes, damascened daggers, and what is known as the merchandise of bijouterie and vertu. There were few papers there, and but one book, a Spanish Army List in gorgeous green velvet cover with gilt clasps. In fact, it was more of an auctioneer's private show-room than cabinet de lecture, for the Brothers Fallola were dealers in bric-à-brac, and could not forego the chance of poking their wares under the notice of their customers. The Italian is first cousin to the Hebrew.

We held a grave Parliament of our own in this little room, and there I made the acquaintance of an English settler in Spain—an elderly gentleman who had been engaged in mining. He was well educated, had travelled widely, was pronounced in his views, and as he expressed them with candour and was possessed of a high order of intelligence, I listened to him with attention. Indeed, we all accepted him as Mentor. He indoctrinated me into the knotty catechism of Spanish politics.

Broadly speaking, he maintained that the monarchy was its own greatest enemy. It had fallen because of its indifference to public opinion. Among its evil genii were the pastrycook Marforio, Father Claret, and Sister Patrocinio. The birth of a daughter to Ferdinand VII., fault of nature, was the primal fatality. As Count O'Neil remarked when he heard the natal salute stop at the nineteenth cannon-shot, unhappy Spain was doomed, because of the gender of the newly-born, to be over-shadowed with the pall of grief and mourning. But the primal error was the unnatural marriage of Isabella to her cousin, Don Francisco. Never was there a more ill-assorted union. A woman of ardent temperament and strong fibre was allied to a feeble nonentity without sap or spirit. Had she become the spouse of a man like Victor Emmanuel, things might have gone better.

Spain was a grand country, he held, one of the richest in creation in minerals, forests, vineyards, orchards, silk and flocks. The people were a people that improved upon intercourse, and had some grand qualities. But the curses of Spain were the ignorance of the masses, the greed of the professional politicians, and the varying ascendancy of some one man's power in the army.

"Was the country ripe for its existing form of government?" I asked.

"Government," said he, "like religion, is very much a matter of birth and training, or, to put it more briefly, of climate. The circumcision of Judaism, the ablutions of Mahometanism, are the simple useful dictates of some wise man skilled in sanitary science. People of warm southern natures crave light and colour and music in worship; in colder lands, with dispositions hardier and less imaginative, they are satisfied with severe forms——"

"I know all those theories about religion," I interrupted, "but I am anxious to have your judgment on government."

"Identically the same—affair of climate. Those who have to brave privations and work hard for a living are Republicans; the Swiss, for example, the Norwegians, and the Carlists."

"The Carlists! I thought they were Royalists."

The Mentor laughed as he said, "Royalists! why, they are the only Republicans in this land. Have you not heard of their fueros? They reject the tax of blood—they will have no unwilling soldiers taken from their midst. So Republican are they that they will not tolerate a Bishop in their ecclesiastical organization, strict Catholics though they profess themselves. He of Seo de Urgel is the nearest Bishop to their territory, and his diocese is properly in Andorra."

"But the Norwegians are Monarchists," I ventured.

"In name only, as the English are. There is no more democratic administration in the world than that of king-ruled Norway; and in England you are likewise a Republic—that is, you enjoy Republican freedom, only you choose to call the President a Queen. The Queen is but a figure-head, the vivified Union Jack. The Prime Minister, that is to say the elect of the people, not the Queen, sways the genuine wand of power."

"And the House of Lords, the most Conservative hereditary legislature in Europe, how do you account for its existence in this British Republic?" I hazarded as a clincher.

"An accident, my dear sir," he replied, as he pulled at his cigarette. "Like that puff of smoke, it has no power; it is but vapour, and like vapour it will disappear some day, to be succeeded by a Senate on the French or American model. Life-peerages can be justified; the hereditary principle has been tried and found wanting. The male offspring of a jockey are not necessarily skilful horsemen; the son of a fencing-master may be an awkward butter-fingers; the daughter of a prima ballerina may be a cripple."

I passed that figure of speech about the vapour, though disciplined vapour drives a locomotive. But I urged, "Do you not believe in blood? Would you place the descendant of a line of brave and cultured men, with traditions to look back upon, on the same level with Bill Sykes or a Bosjesman? Is a game-cock a dunghill? Is a thoroughbred a plough-horse?"

"R-o-t, rot, my dear sir," said Mentor, with an irritating coolness. "Of game-cocks I know nothing; but as far as your horse argument goes, I am prepared to meet you. Care is taken that the mare shall be mated with the proper sire, so that the qualities long worked up to, by judicious crossing, shall not be lost or deteriorated; but there is no such selection in the case of a lord; he follows his own figary, and his figary is usually money, to regild a faded shield. Blood, sir, has less to do with those things than education and the associations of childhood. Send an earl's son to St. Giles', and he will grow up a saucy gutter-boy; send a burglar's son to Eton, and he may develop into what is conventionally recognised as a gentleman."

There was no arguing down our Mentor on this point, so the subject was changed, and he tried to disintegrate the ingredients in the very mixed dish of Spanish parties—a complete olla podrida. There were five factions in the distracted State, two schools of Monarchists and three of Republicans. These were—1st, the Alfonsists, or those who wished that the son of the deposed Queen should be raised to the throne; 2nd, the Legitimists or Carlists (embracing a large body of the clergy); 3rd, the Republicans of long standing, who were actually in power; 4th, the ex-Monarchists—the neo-Republicans or Radicals, who sometimes called themselves Progresistas, and favoured the United Republic; and 5th, the Intransigentes, or the Irreconcilables, the extreme of the extreme, who clamoured for a Federal Republic.

"As example of that ignorance of the masses of which I spoke," said Mentor, "the mob of Madrid is fiercely Federal, which proves that it does not know what Federalism is; for one of the first results of Federalism would be to reduce this capital to the plane of a third-rate provincial town. Federalism is Spanish dismemberment. If such a system were adopted, you would have a Royalist North, a Red Republican Catalonia, and a pauperized Castile, politically piebald. Catalonia is Federal, in which Catalonia writes itself down ass, for that province is manufacturing, and with the downfall of protection its prosperity must depart."

"Is there any chance of Amadeus being coaxed back?"

He laughed a laugh that embarrassed me.

"A kick is not soon forgotten, for it is always an insult even when administered with an embroidered slipper."

"What do you think of the situation at the moment?" (This was in the first week of March.)

"Madrid," he answered, "is a hot-bed of political intrigue, and a complicated intrigue is in act of being developed at present. This, I take it, is a fair estimate of the situation. The men in office are controlled by fears of the violent Republicans outside, whom they are powerless to keep under; and the Radicals are anxious to get into office to restrain these same violent Republicans, but hesitate because of the apprehension that they have not sufficient material force behind them. They would fain climb, but that they fear to fall. Thus, as you perceive, the disorganization of the army is at the bottom of all the difficulties, for that it is which leaves the mastery with the dreaded Intransigents. Those, the 'partisans of action' as they are aptly called sometimes, have more energy than either the Ministry or the Radicals, and if this dilly-dallying goes on much longer they may make a bold attempt to get the reins into their own hands. The Radicals are opposed to a dissolution of the Assembly because they fear the Reds would command the polls at the new elections, and go in for sweeping changes on the model of their predecessors in Paris. The present Ministers have not the vigour to check the manœuvring that would bring about such an occurrence, and the Radicals believe that they only could oppose and beat down the fanatics of Communistic proclivities. There are cynics, however, who sneer at patriotic affirmations, and whisper that loaves and fishes have more to do with them than love of country."

I reflected that patriotism of that order was not an exclusively Iberian production, but that possibly the cynics were disappointed politicians themselves.

"The state of the army," resumed Mentor, "is the question after all. A great portion of the rank and file are violently Republican, and one cause of insubordination is that the privates do not believe in the Republicanism of their officers. Of course, the object of the Ministry in raising the proposed battalions of volunteers, is less to put down Carlism than to have a force to fall back upon in case of the army giving itself furlough. I have reason to know that one Minister at least is very uneasy on account of the want of discipline of the troops, and urges upon his colleagues that their first labour should be devoted to repressing all signs of disorder. But the fight for place at Madrid has more interest for them, and the army is melting away. When Ministers make up their minds to a rigorous supervision of the soldiery, there may be no soldiers to supervise."

It dawned upon me that Spaniards, although enjoying the reputation of being quick with lethal weapons under the spur of sudden passion, were very slow in taking ordinary resolutions. "Mañana" is the watchword of the nation: a favourite proverb is twisted into "Never do to-day what you can possibly put off till to-morrow." As a French writer wittily observed, the chariot of State in Spain is fashioned of tortoise-shell and drawn by snails.

"What do you think of Castelar?"

"Castelar!" echoed the Mentor, with a shoulder-movement of compassionate irony, "honest, but weak. He is too good, too single-minded, too amiable, too much of a student to play the Cæsar. Picture to yourself a doctrinaire who can quote Aristotle in the Chamber, while his country is travelling the road to ruin. Poor Señor Castelar is not the coming man."

"And where may we look for him?" I asked.

"Quien sabe? At this moment he may be waxing his moustache in the Balearic Islands, or sipping chocolate in the coffee-house on the ground-floor."

That coffee-house was always full at the juncture. Indeed, to one who had not been made stoical by familiarity with excitements, the tokens of the atmosphere were portentous. Congress often sat under the protection of an armed guard. The crowds in the streets were always large. The talk was of bloodshed; but I had grown so sceptical that I would hardly believe in bloodshed in Madrid until what looked a liquid red had been chemically analyzed and proved to be blood. We had false alarms every other night, and shops were shut for an hour or two; but we got no nearer to revolution than the discussions of sundry excited parliaments over the marble-topped tables. There Spaniards flushed purple, and gesticulated violently over their temperate glasses of sweetened water. What a blessing this is not a whisky-drinking country!

"No," continued the Mentor; "Castelar is the least of all fitted to govern Spain. This people requires to be ruled by stern will and strong grip. The result of handing it over to a weak administration is palpable. Of all nations of the world, Spain is least prepared for Republicanism, and the theoretical Republicans who essayed to control her, in an evil moment for themselves, must before this have discovered the gross blunder they have made. The Republic is a splendid word; but Order is a word more wholesome. The present so-called rulers are incapable of preserving order. They sowed the wind when they taught the soldiers to be malcontent under the Monarchy, because an army was an artificial need in a free nation. Now that the soldiers are taking them at their word, they are reaping the whirlwind. They promised Spain liberty, and Spain, from every indication, is about to enjoy a spell of license. Heaven knows how it will all end; but those who have acutely watched changes like this in other countries are not slow to tell us that we shall have anarchy first to the full."

"And then?" I inquired, "for anarchy is no remedy. It is never final. What shall we have after that?"

"Perhaps a Conservative Republic, but more likely an iron despotism, the dominance of some successful General who has the knack of answering his opponents by ordering their heads to be sliced off."

"Is not that General as likely as not to come from the Carlist camp?" I demanded.

Mentor shook his head in a decisive negative. "No," he said; "outside the northern and a portion of the eastern provinces, Carlism has no solidity."

"But may not the name of Dorregaray, who has crossed the frontier again, turn out to be a spell-word? They tell me he distinguished himself in the war with Morocco."

"Yes," assented Mentor, "he commanded a regiment of galley-slaves there."

"And," I continued, "in Cuba at the outbreak of hostilities he was to the fore."

"True, true; but I would not give that," and he snapped his fingers, "for the fidelity of such as Dorregaray. He served under Don Carlos in the civil war from 1836 to 1840, and that did not hinder him from donning a uniform under Isabella. Cosas de España! Have you never heard of Piquero? His action is a pretty fair criterion of the political morality of your ordinary ambitious Spanish soldier."

No, the man's name was new to me.

"Well, he commanded the regiment of Malaga when Ferdinand VII. returned from France and was made absolute monarch. General Piquero, as soon as he got wind of the decree of absolutism, thought he would be first to curry favour at Court, and sent an address to the palace, praying that his regiment might have the honour of wearing chains emblazoned on the colours in testimony of attachment to the King. The prayer was magnanimously acceded to, and the chains were absolutely borne on the colours for years. Yet not very long afterward this Piquero, this mean, fawning cur, changed front and became a yelping hungry mastiff of democracy. I don't anticipate Dorregaray would play that part."

"Anyhow," I persisted, "the Carlist General has sent forth a manifesto in his self-assumed capacity of commander-in-chief of the Vascongadas and Navarre to the soldiers of the Spanish army. He calls upon them to lay down their arms, promising them free discharges if they desire it, but promotion, decorations, and rewards if they join his standard. What do you think of that?"

"I do not blame him," said Mentor. "In thus tempting the army, he is only doing as every military chief who has ever lifted himself to power by a pronunciamiento has done. The sergeants and corporals are invariably lured with the bait that they shall be made captains and lieutenants, the common soldiers that their pay and rations shall be increased. Such men as go over to Dorregaray only act as too many of their predecessors have acted. In this instance they have an excuse; they can say, 'We were Royalist soldiers a few weeks ago; we are transformed into Republican soldiers now. Our will was never consulted. We are Royalist still, therefore we rally to Don Carlos, who represents the principle of Monarchy.' They could say this, but I am far from thinking they will. Spaniards of the rank and file do not chop logic; it is the non-commissioned officers who initiate mutinies for purposes of personal advancement; the private is a machine, not a thinking bayonet."

In response to my inquiry as to the influence which remained to the Church, my Mentor shook his head, and said outside the hilly regions where Carlism prevailed, and the remote rural districts, it was next to null, save among the more comfortable class of women. The common Spaniard took his faith as he would his heritage; he was a Christian because his fathers were so before him—it was an affair of family—and his calling himself a Christian, which signifies Christian exclusively of the Roman Catholic persuasion, is a survival of the thoughts bequeathed by the Saracenic occupation. He who was not a Christian was a "Moro," and to this day the Jew or the Protestant is a Moor, tarred with the same brush as the turbaned Islamite.

"The Church," concluded Mentor, "is not to blame if it bums incense and assaults Heaven with prayers for such a change of Government as will bring money to its coffers. If the Republic last, the Church will be separated from the State, and every congregation will have to pay its own minister. That would be frank, at all events; but so long as there is a State religion, the ministers of which are supposed to be paid, it is a scandal not to pay them, and their reverences are perfectly right to turn Carlist or Alfonsist."

After these discussions in the reading-room I sometimes felt as if I had been endeavouring to unravel the Schleswig-Holstein tangle. Was I not right in warning off the ladies? Truly, Spanish politics are confusing. My usual reflections upon them resolved themselves into the uneasy conviction that they were a Lincoln morass overlaid by a London fog, and that it would be a joy to have some thousands of Will-o'-the-Wisp guides prisoned to the chins in the quagmire, and replaced by one benevolent despot bearing the light with strong, sure grasp.

CHAPTER VII.

The Carnival—About Kissing Feet—Mummers and Masquers—The Paseo de Recoletos—The Writer is taken for Cluseret—Incongruity in Costume—Shrove Tuesday—Panic on the Prado—A Fancy Ball—The "Entierro de la Sardina"—Lenten Amusements—A Spanish Mystery—"Pasion y Muerte de Jesus"—Of the Stage Stagey—Critical Remarks.

SIMULTANEOUSLY with the Ministerial crisis we were tortured by the throes of the Carnival, which was a trial too great for a Republic so young. But the weather came to the aid of the powers that were, and prevented the festival from rising to a height of merriment when it might become tumultuous. The opening day was one of leaden skies and moist pavements in the forenoon, of little patches of ultramarine above and little eruptions of noise below in the afternoon. There is one consolation on a wet day—you can conveniently make inspection of the extremities of dear womankind. I no longer elevate my eyebrows at the Spanish formula of compliment to the mistress of one's affections—"I kiss your feet." Anyone could kiss them with pleasure; they are so tiny, shapely, and sylph-like. There surely are the "little mice" of Suckling's ballad! Atalanta must have had ankles like those revealed under the lifted skirts of the doncella yonder, Cinderella such another pair of arched insteps. But one cannot contemplate them for ever, bitten by the statuary's mania for the symmetric though he be.

On the second morning, there was a light grey fog, like the smoke after gunpowder, on the square called "The Gate of the Sun." I have tasted the joys of Carnival elsewhere—at Rome in Papal times and at Paris in Imperial times—but never did the tomfoolery like me less. Muggy weather, miserable Carnival. No showers of confetti, no procession of the bœuf gras even. Here and there the orchestras of the theatres, clad in the cast-off finery of the supernumeraries thereof, parade the streets, and make dissonance with their instruments. Very German-bandish this dissonance sounds, with a variety of horror thrown in liberally in the shape of tambourines and triangles. One corps of mumming musicians is dressed as Zouaves; another might be directors of a Funeral Company, so sad their garments; a third is got up in a costume semi-nightshirt, semi-dressing-gown; all send out agents to tout for backsheesh. That is their great point of resemblance. The masquers are few in the streets, and, such as they are, wear their motley as if for pay, not for pastime. They are of the usual order, Pierrots, Polichinelles, and cavaliers, with no wigs, with powdered wigs, and with curly wigs, and with vizors hideous or ghastly, or simply droll and grotesque. Among the latter are some which might have been designed by Dykwnkyn for a Drury Lane pantomime; but the individual who carried off the palm of burlesque was an equestrian I met in the Plaza Mayor, looking like one of the men in armour of a Lord Mayor's show with bonneted head-gear, astride of a pot-bellied Clydesdale. Perhaps he may have been caricaturing "the ingenious gentleman" of La Mancha. My most grateful anticipation of Spain was, that it was behind the age, and was in no hurry to overtake it. But this did not hold good in Madrid, and dear womankind with the tiny feet was the culprit. She disfigured herself at that epoch with an enormous bustle on which a Barbary ape might conveniently rehearse a bolero. Well, we have had our Grecian bends, our crinolines and crinolettes, our pull-backs and Piccadilly limps. Fashion spells despot everywhere, and dear womankind will cheerfully obey its dictates, even though she have to blur her cheeks with patches, distort her spine, or tightlace herself into consumption.

In the afternoon a long procession of carriages (mostly hired) traverses the Calle de Alcalá and the promenade to the left of the fountain where Cybele is sculptured driving a pair of meekest ox-like lions; the folk in the carriages are not wildly joyous in their dissipation, nor are the horses that draw them restive with excitement. Everything is dull, consequently respectable; orderly, consequently dreary. The Foresters' fête at the Crystal Palace is more hilarious. No shafts of delicate raillery are shot by cherry lips; no peal of silvery laughter rings out. The Carnival is "stale, flat, and unprofitable," except to those mumming musicians who have paid sixteen shillings for the license to beg during the three mock-mirthful days. I survey the scene from a window in the Paseo de Recoletos, and get all my enjoyment out of the cynical remarks of a monstrously fine Burgundian lady, who criticises the dresses of her Spanish sisters as they glide by. The dresses are very tasteless, but the Frenchwoman's remarks are very ill-natured, and ill-nature is gratifying when your neighbour is its object. A friend enters and claps me on the back.

"Do you know, old fellow, that that stormy petrel of the Revolution, Cluseret of the Commune, is said to be in Madrid?"

"Never! What brings him here?"

"Said to be, was my expression," he added. "As a fact, I don't believe he is here, but they take you for him. That is how the tale of his arrival has got into the papers."

The Burgundian lady turns. "Cluseret!" she ejaculates; "absurd! I have seen Cluseret; he is much taller and much handsomer than this gentleman!"

I bowed to hide my face, which was what Mr. Whistler might have called a symphony in black and red, frown and blush. I have since thought what a caustic retort I might have made if I had said politely, "And, it is to be hoped, much more well-bred." But I said nothing, for the same reason that Dr. Johnson gave once to Boswell—"I had nothing ready, sir."

The panorama underneath is duller now; occasionally a foolish horseman canters by, covered as to his person and his charger's quarters with a flowing roquelaure of sheeny green satin; or a black-haired damsel trips it by, with features concealed by sky-blue mask, and proportions by an outer vesture of a painfully bright gamboge colour. I wonder is her hair her own, and are her eyes black. Most likely they are—night eyes are the rule here—the fair (that is the dark) sex are all going to purgatory if the French couplet be authority:—

Again fanciful reflection is broken in upon by the thrumming of guitars, the shrill squeak of fifes, and the eternal whirr and jingle of the tambourines and triangles, and I descend and make my way through the fast-thickening crowds to my hotel. There, where the company, like the waiters, is polyglot; where a noble, white-bearded English gentleman is sandwiched between a little German professor and a Diputado to the Congress, where French journalists sit by young American exquisites, who are picking up notions in Europe, and mere tourists who have come to "do" Spain in thirteen days are listening to the experiences of a mining engineer from the West Riding of Yorkshire, who has been in the country for thirteen years; the gossip, unlike the fun without, is fast and furious. But as it is all of politics, and I gave the reader a dose of that in the last chapter and may have to repeat it anon, I turn to the windows and scan the ever-animated, always-varying picture on the Puerta del Sol. Ladies in veils white and black, as of Genoa and Milan respectively, pass and re-pass, gilt missals in their hands. They will be at the masked balls to-night, for this, as I have said already, is the home of paradox, where the announcement of the church in which the Quarant'ore, or Forty-hours' Exposition of the Sacrament, is being held, is printed in the same column with the theatrical advertisements. Over the way stand a group in the national "capa." Why do they not wear slouched and plumed beavers? To me a chimney-pot hat surmounting a cloak is as dire an outrage on poetic association as a Venetian bravo with a quizzing-glass. It offends the sense of fitness. What if the Madrileños were to take to the Ulster-coat? It would make a capital Carnival disguise at all events. But the cloak, is it not mysterious, brigandish—tragic, if you will? Mark that loosely-built, tawny man of dare-devil aspect on the edge, bending intently towards the excited speaker in the middle. Something has discomposed him, for his cheeks purple. There is an agitated flutter under the cloak, and its folds are flung back. You expect to be startled by the blade of a stiletto, and out comes a soiled pocket-handkerchief! It is as if Jupiter Tonans were to threaten a thunderbolt and compromise with a sneeze.

The third day of the Carnival, Shrove Tuesday, was all that could be desired, sunny, sprightly, bustling. The streets palpitated with merrymakers walking, riding, or driving, most of them handsomely dressed; the music—good, bad, and indifferent—was unceasing; the legions of roysterers attired themselves in every conceivable vagary of costume, even to the cheap resource of a chintz dressing-gown. They were cheerful, but in a business-like matter-of-fact way, and as they promenaded twirled corncrakes, jingled tin cans, and tootled horns. Few women disgraced themselves by appearing in men's clothes. Madrid is more continent than Paris; and, to its credit be it recorded, there was neither drunkenness nor horse-play. In the afternoon the scene in the Prado was kaleidoscopic in variety and beauty and motion; it had in it the gay element of the true Carnival, and those who had held aloof before or had been deterred from sharing in the fête by the inauspicious natural weather or by nervousness owing to the unsettled condition of the political weather, came out fresh, frolicsome, and bent on making up for lost time. Some of the dresses were luxurious, and triumphantly bore the test of sunshine, which is inexorable for what is worn or seedy or imitation. And yet there seldom was a time to which the stereotyped figure of speech about dancing on a volcano more strikingly applied. Electricity was in the air; the troops were under arms; the Deputies were consulting under the protection or the threat (as the balance of feeling might incline) of canister-stuffed cannon, and it was quite within the range of the possible that before nightfall the cavalry might be fetlock deep in blood, and the carnage of the Dos de Mayo be repeated—a worse carnage, for the Spaniards who fell then were patriots slain gloriously fighting against the foreigner, and now they would be Spaniards killed by brothers.

The stream of pleasure was in its full force and flow when a strange murmur followed by a succession of slight screams arrested the attention of the merrymakers. Faces were turned inquiringly towards the point whence the sounds came; the faces grew serious as a carriage was noticed breaking from the ranks and driving smartly down a side-street, they were overspread with alarm as other carriages filed off, and then, quick as a cloud overcasts the sun, a curtain of gloom fell upon the moving multitude. There was a halt as if by general consent, a dead silence, a thrill of trepidation, and a rapid rush and scurry hither and thither to shelter. Trailing skirts were caught up, vizors were thrown aside, grey-bearded patriarchs tore off their wigs and spectacles, the fiddling and singing came to an abrupt ending, and were replaced by curses and shrieks; all order and courtesy were cast to the four winds of heaven. It was a perfect tragi-comedy; a mixture of the terrible, the risible, the ominous, the rococo. I never saw transformation so sharp. It was as if there was no room for any less ignoble feeling in the lately jocose, bantering throngs than self-preservation. Drivers lashed their horses and mules and galloped off furiously; equestrians careered towards all points of the compass; those on foot bolted into every hall-way that stood ajar, or disappeared down the nearest openings; shrubs and flowers were trampled upon, and in a span shorter than it takes to recount it, the avenue of the Prado was a desert. It was fierce wholesale scamper and stampede. The roadway and parks were strewn with fans, masks, pocket-handkerchiefs, gloves and slippers; the entire company of masquerading Arabs, Prussian officers, Morris dancers, Inquisitors, and troubadours had taken incontinent flight, most of them breathless and white; the ladies in their varied characters of gipsies, grisettes, Galician nurses, and Court coquettes had all scudded off in such a dismayed flutter that they had forgotten to swoon, and forfeited the finest of opportunities of breaking into hysterics. They were really frightened. I sought refuge (from what I knew not, whether earthquake, hurricane or revolution) in a thick clump of bushes at the side of the Paseo, where I stumbled over a panting make-believe toreador, and a curious wire-woven article of ladies' dress, which latter I appropriated as trophy. By-and-by, as no fresh cry of alarm was raised, the bull-fighter crawled out, and I took heart of grace to return to the centre of the town, where I learned that the scare was groundless. It had its origin in the glitter of the bayonets of some soldiers returning from their duties at the Palace of the Congress. Madrid was timid as a sick girl. It struck me that if there had been genuine cause for the panic, and that a charge had been made or a volley with lead fired, there would have been unequalled scope for a picture of the type of Gérôme's "Duel after the Bal Masqué," but on a more liberal scale—Polichinelle pierced by a bayonet-thrust, the floured face of Pierrot streaked with blood, and poor Jack Pudding sprawling in the death-agonies in the gutter.

The festivities were prolonged to the small hours of the night, or rather of the morning, none the less vigorously for the passing fear-spasm in the Prado; the masked balls at the theatres were packed with guests who enjoyed themselves, or fancied they did, which is as much as one can reasonably expect in this mundane sphere sometimes.

The "Marseillaise" from a vibrating brass band might be heard, nay almost felt, crashing through the glass-doors and bursting in a cataract of sound through the drapery at the entrances of the café on the ground-floor of the Fonda de Paris at the hour when honest burgesses should be tête-à-tête with the pillow.

On Ash Wednesday, which rose rainily, there was an augmentation in the average of headaches, and a rise in the rates for apothecary's stuff. The pious revellers went (with an interval for washing and change of clothes) from the ball-room to the churches to receive the ashes. "Remember, man, thou art but dust, and unto dust thou shalt return," says the priest, and smears their foreheads with the cinders of last year's palm-branches. Another custom, peculiar to the date, the "entierro de la sardina," was duly observed by those wicked rogues, the non-pious revellers. The sardina is not the fish, but a portion of the intestines of a pig, which is laid to earth with pseudo-lamentation in token of carne vale, farewell to flesh-meat for forty days. With a lugubrious affectation of grief the funeral pageant passed. It was very profane—an undissembled mockery of a religious procession. A banner striped pink and yellow and inscribed "á los Cubanos" was carried in front by a fellow in West Indian negro dress with blackened face. Next came a troop of blackened acolytes, two by two, and then a canopy such as is borne over the Host, which canopy was held in travesty of homage over a beer-keg. A sacrilegious choir, chanting a parody of a Gregorian hymn, paced behind, and a gigantic blackguard, the serpent du village, supplied a droning accompaniment from a bassoon. A blackened high-priest, with a conical black hat and a cope bee-barred black and yellow, closed the burlesque train and made believe to read a mass-book through his pantomimic goggles. There was an attendant who rang a funeral bell, another who tapped a muffled drum, and a third who swung right under the nostrils of the onlookers a censer containing ground resin made vile to the smell by some fetid compound. Occasionally the profane rascals halted for a pull at a goat-skin of wine.

There are some queer customs, the undeniable relics of paganism, in Spain. On Christmas-eve the streets are paraded by men rattling pots, just as the Romans used to celebrate the row that was made in Olympus to hide the birth of Jupiter from Saturn. In the Basque provinces they honour the Virgin Mary under the name of Astarte, a clear loan from the worship of Venus. As I am treating of queer customs, it is worth chronicling that the Republicans entered the churches as soon as their favourite Government was proclaimed and frantically rang the bells. A Bishop took care to exorcise the Republican demon next day by carefully sprinkling the bells with holy-water.

For all the Lent, the treacherous and trying weather, the wars and rumours of wars, Madrid enjoyed herself, ate, drank and made merry, flirted and gambled. The Opera, a cosy well-frequented resort of the fashionable set, was open, and gave the Creation and L'Africaine, and the usual repertory of musical masterpieces of which I plead profound technical ignorance redeemed by passionate fondness. The soprano was that plump goddess with the dimpled double chin, fair-haired Marie Sass. The orchestra was one of the finest I had ever heard, and the chorus in personal appearance one of the ugliest I had ever seen, and that, I can assure the reader, is saying much. The Zarzuela, a play-house devoted to opera-bouffe—the sacred lamp of burlesque was not trimmed—presented "Golden Dreams," a beautiful piece with plot and fun not cumbered with that scenic sumptuousness which is trying to edge acting ability off the boards elsewhere.

The respectable theatres in Madrid shut their doors on the Fridays in Lent, and respectable theatre-goers remain at home. It is not the correct thing to be seen pleasure-hunting on a day of mortification and white meats. But actors must live, as well as in London. Those who are connected with high-priced houses and are decently paid can afford to lose one night in the week. But there are poorer followers of the Thespian art who are in very bad case indeed, owing to this tribute to religious scruple. If we are to be virtuous, well and good: but let us be virtuous in earnest. We have bull-fights on the Sundays in Lent. Why may we not enjoy the singing of Marie Sass in Norma on a Lenten Friday? This thin distinction between what is right and what is not—so thin that men of the cold north cannot make it out—comes under the category of those indigenous peculiarities which surpass all understanding. Anyhow, it presses rather heavily on the humble votaries of the sock and buskin who are attached to the middle-class houses, and who are docked of one night's salary in every week of the seven in the penitential season, in order that the proprieties of a public which is not particular to a shade as to how it observes the Sabbath may be respected. The low theatres—the Romea, where the Republic is glorified; the Alhambra, where heels are kicked up and lewd songs are rolled forth; the Capellanes, where monks and nuns are caricatured, have reason on their side, at all events. They dare to be logical in their contempt for the Church, and keep open all the year round, on Friday as on Sunday, in the time of fasting as of feasting.

The Teatro Martin is not a low theatre nor yet is it a high-priced one. The actors there are not rich, but the audience has some pretensions to delicacy of taste. What is the lessee of the Martin to do during the Lent? To rob his treasury of one night's receipts and cheat his patrons of one night's enjoyment? That would be the last crime any spirited and enterprising lessee would dream of committing—if he could avoid it. From this dilemma the gentleman of the Teatro Martin has discovered an escape. He opens his house on Fridays, but he converts it into a temple; he reconciles amusement with religion; he produces a Passion Play! I went to see it for the special reason that it was my privilege once to describe the Passion Play in the Bavarian Highlands, and I was anxious to compare one representation with the other, and, if possible, to renew my emotions of the past.

The house was tolerably full, except the boxes, which were unoccupied, save one by a sedate family party. Devout folk of the Latin race are famous for the interest they take in the spectacular. They admire the pomps of religion; and this Passion Play, which was almost a function, had evidently brought many to the theatre who are seldom seen there on ordinary occasions. I thought I could detect a pious bearing in the pittites. The well-to-do persons—male and female—who sat patiently on the mouldy benches looked serious, as if they had come to assist at a sacrifice. There were old ladies there, I could almost take my word, who are more often to be encountered, with morocco-bound prayer-books in their shrivelled hands, creeping to early service. The gallery was packed, and the gods, for gods, were gentlemanlike. There was nothing in the aspect of the house meriting description—it was roomy, ill-lit, full of draughts and dust—one of those houses we know so well. The scene-painter, if the act-drop was a fair sample of his powers, was a victim to colour-blindness; the orchestra showed a Republican freedom in its scorn for the trammels of time and tune; but the prompter in his hooded box, full in the middle of the range of footlights, was the feature of the show. He had a very distinct voice—so distinct was it that every sentence he directed to the actors rebounded from the flats, came back in sibilant echo, and ascended to the gods. I have no intention of giving an analysis of the piece; to speak the sad truth, it did not come up to my expectations. Ober-Ammergau spoiled me for exhibitions of the kind. I could not screw up my enthusiasm, tried I ever so hard. That which charmed in Bavaria had no charm in Spain. The stately panorama which was put before the awe-struck spectator in that valley of the Ammer was not visible here. The blue sky overhead and the eternal hills in sight above the walls of the simple wooden structure; the music so tender and solemn; the clear-browed peasants losing their identity in the fervid rendering of their parts; the enraptured attention of the auditory, whose lips moved in prayer sometimes, and whose eyes sometimes brimmed with tears, as if the scenes they watched were real—those were things to be remembered. They were the points that helped to make an impression in Bavaria, that dispelled prejudice and replaced it with a pleased satisfaction which insensibly swelled to admiration; but they were wanting in this stuffy play-house. No illusion was possible. One never lost the consciousness that he was looking on at a stage-play acted for money by indifferent stage-players. There was a smell of paint and tobacco-smoke about. Then there was the voice of that irrepressible prompter, the shaven faces of the hungry supernumeraries who played the Roman soldiers, the gas-rakes, the shaky wings, the mark of the trap-doors from which devils with a family likeness to the imps of pantomime spring up to-night, and the statue of the Commander may emerge to-morrow night, the scenes that would not run smoothly in the grooves, and the stiff stereotyped exits and entrances. Everything was of the stage, stagey. One could not get rid of the notion that Caiaphas had dined on puchero with its flavour heightened by garlic. It was very palpable that the Apostle Peter wore a wig and a beard of tow. Mary Magdalen had an air of operatic resignation, and was troubled with the arrangement of her drapery. There was a layer of pearl-powder on the Virgin's cheeks.

I shall not bore the reader with an essay on mysteries and miracle-plays; neither, as I have said, shall I attempt to analyse this sacred drama, in seven acts, of "The Passion and Death of Jesus;" but I shall take the liberty of giving an epitome of some notes, pencilled on the spot, in the intervals of interruption by that loud prompter. The Pasion y Muerte de Jesus (that is the Spanish title) is written by Don Enrique Zumel, who appears to have fathered as many pieces as Lope de Vega, but whose pieces are not quite so well known. It was brought out for the first time in this self-same Teatro Martin on the 3rd of March, 1871. It is in verse, and has some literary merit. In the main incidents it resembles the Bavarian play, which does not deviate noticeably from the Bible narrative. It is unnecessary, therefore, to go over the incidents of its various acts. The Greek chorus to be remarked at Ober-Ammergau is absent. The tableaux from the Old Testament prefiguring events in the New are absent also. The first Act opens with a dialogue between Magdalen and some women of Jerusalem. The Saviour, with the Apostles, enters on the scene almost immediately after. Magdalen's garments are rich with spangles; her mantle is scarlet; she has flowers in her luxuriant tresses, and looks a vain creature. The Saviour is personified by an actor with a singular likeness to Joseph Mayer, the Bavarian Christus. Pale, clean-chiselled face, long black locks smoothed over, downcast eyes, a meek demeanour generally—the characteristics are identical. The voice of this man, who essayed so awful a rôle, was low and sweet; and, to give him his due, he moved as if he was filled with respect for his dangerous part. The Virgin comes on the scene in the same Act. She is clad in blue nun-like raiment. The people who filled up the background wore sandals, and had white towels, swathed in folds like those of the turban, round their raven-black hair. The entry into Jerusalem was shown, the Saviour being mounted on a white ass. The orchestra here woke up, and played a joyous strain to a chorus commencing—

and terminating with a hosannah to the Redeemer. The only anachronisms in dress that impressed me in this first Act were a silk net with which one young person of Jerusalem confined her rebellious hair, and a strip of black velvet which another had fastened round her throat, bringing out the whiteness of her skin by contrast. In the second Act Caiaphas speaks of Jesus as the fomenter of a "thousand conflicts between Church and State." The Last Supper is pictured after Leonardo da Vinci, and Judas comes into relief, a sullen scowler, who overdoes his part thus early. In the garden scene in the third Act the figure of Jesus in prayer is shown with a ray of luz Dumont, the lime-light of our London stage, playing upon it! I left my seat after this, and loitered outside till the Crucifixion scene was on. At Ammergau it was appallingly impressive; here it was sensational purely. The drama wound up with the bursting open of the sepulchre. I came away free from any desire to witness Don Enrique Zumel's production again. Without absolutely shocking one's feelings on a subject which should be sacred and approached reverently, if at all, his Passion Play offended fine taste throughout because of the obtrusive staginess of its action, get-up, and surroundings. Still the actors were occasionally applauded, and the audience left in a contented mood.

But the provisional rulers took care that those under their guardianship should have stronger pabulum than spoon-meat.

Napoleon I., unless the tale be a legend, used to order a new coat of gilding to be laid on the dome of the Invalides when the people of Paris chafed under his tyranny. That gave them something to talk about—supplied a sensation of twenty-four hours. The Spanish Republican governors are working on the same principle. Panes et circenses was the charter of the Roman plebs, "pan y toros" is that of the plebs of Madrid. I do not know how it is with the bread, but the rulers let the lieges have bulls galore to occupy their minds. There are grand corridas for professionals and amateurs. Nor is bull-fighting the only pastime provided for the populace; cock-fighting, with game-birds from the Canary Islands, is also carried on every Sunday morning in a pit constructed for the purpose, mains are scientifically fought, and money is prodigally squandered. All countries have their peculiarities. In some, people go racing on the Lord's Day; in others they are content with getting drunk in the bosoms of their families.

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NOTE BY MY VERY LEARNED AND AMIABLE ACCOMPLICE, DR. DANN.—That great writer on Spanish folk-lore, Mesonero Romanos, better known as "El curioso parlante," who flourished some fifty years since, seems utterly ignorant of the record of the "entierro." His account only goes to show that Spain is the most conservative country of Europe. A huge "sardina" placed on the top of a bier is carried by a number of fellows in carnival costume, each of them having on his head a cone of immense height, somewhat resembling the dunce's cap that was formerly such a usual thing in English village-schools. In front, and at the back of the procession, appears a crowd of young men and of girls from the slums of Southern Madrid, in three groups, called "coros," or choirs. There is the "coro de mancebos," or young men's choir; the "coro de doncellas," or girls' choir; and the "coro de inocentes," or innocents' choir. The locus in quo is that part of the south of the Spanish capital which extends from the Vistillas de San Francisco to the Church of San Lorenzo; for, in contradistinction to Paris, the South of Madrid is almost exclusively inhabited by what M. Gambetta used to call the new social strata, while Mr. Bright spoke of them many years ago as the residuum. In connection with the sardina, and rising on the same coffin, a figure of "Uncle Marcos" is carried, somewhat similar in form to the stuffed Guy Fawkeses which are carried about in the streets of London on the 5th of November. When the procession has reached the Puente Toledana, the figure of Uncle Marcos is burnt on a funeral pile, and the sardina is buried in a ditch prepared on purpose. While all this is going on, songs intended to be parodies of the Catholic Church hymns and canticles are chanted by the accompanying choirs, and altogether the performance is, for all practical purposes, a parody of the Church processions so frequent in Spain and all Southern countries. When it is all over, a good many of the actors indulge in libations. Not unfrequently the burial of the sardina is followed by a free fight, and half a dozen dead or wounded are the outcome of the battle. Disgusting as the whole performance may appear, more especially the blasphemous simulacre of religious worship, it must be admitted in palliation that the very idea of mocking the rites of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church never so much as enters the minds of the performers, who would repudiate with the utmost indignation the notion of intentionally placing themselves outside the pale of the Church, and violating the "buenas costumbres" by what they are doing.

CHAPTER VIII.

Another Chat with Mentor—A Startling Solution of the Spanish Question—The Penalties of Popularity—The Republic another Saturn—The New Civil Governor—The Government Bill—Outside the Palace of the Congress—Providential Rain—Wild Rumours—Federal Threats—The Five Civil Guards—Inside the Chamber—The Great Debate—The Two Reports—Compromise—Minor Speechmakers—A Pickwickian Contention—The Division—Victory for the Ministry—The Five Civil Guards Trot to Stables.

ON the morning of March 8th, I met my Anglo-Spanish Mentor in the reading-room of the hotel. To my usual inquiry as to the condition of health of the Republic, he replied that he thought we were nearing the critical point.

"There is a cataclysm impending," he said. "We have got beyond the stage of changing the names of streets and substituting the Hymn of Riego for the Royal March. Everybody agrees that a coup d'état is necessary, and may be imminent; we want an intelligent despotism—but the despot must always be a man of our own party. There is the hitch. Castelar probably may have some amiable hobby, like Lamartine, of 'employment for adults and education for the young.' Whatever be the sequel of the trial of strength, I hope we may have a strong administration, not one like the present, where the Minister of Grace and Justice is all grace and no justice.

"Do you know," he added, after a pause, "I have an idea as to the solution of this Spanish question?"

"What is it, pray?"

"SELL SPAIN TO ENGLAND!"

I roared with derisive laughter.