e
Manzanares has every requisite for a fine trout stream, but water.

"Madrid has one peculiarity which conduces very much to the visitor's
comfort, namely, that there are very few inevitable 'sights' to be
gone through. The armory said to be the finest in the world; the
palace, ditto (which people who are addicted to upholstering may
go and see, if they don't mind breaking the tenth commandment); the
museum of natural history, where is the largest loadstone in active
operation between this and Medina; and the Academia, nearly complete
the list. Everybody should devote a morning to the last-named, were it
only for the sake of the Murillos. The famous picture of 'St. Isabel
giving alms to the sick' has been arrested at Madrid on its return
from Paris to Seville. As the Sevilians have instituted a 'process'
for its recovery, it is likely to stay there for some time longer.
'The Patrician's Dream' is quite cheering to look upon, so rich and
glowing it is. Shut your eyes to the semi-ludicrous effect of husband,
wife, and dog, in a decreasing series, like the three genders in
Lindley Murray, all asleep.

"The gardens of the queen, sunk in a deep hollow below the palace,
deserve a visit. The head-gardener, of course a Frenchman, struggles
gallantly against all kinds of difficulties of soil, climate, and lack
of water. By a series of ingenious artifices he has concocted a plot
of grass, some ten feet square, to the great astonishment of all
natives."

NARVAEZ IN THE SENATE.

"One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate in the
_Senado_, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds its sittings in
the chapel of a suppressed convent, near the palace. By dint of paint,
gilding, and carpets, the room has been divested of its sanctified
aspect, and made to look like a handsome modern room. They have not
thought it necessary that a place in which a hundred gentlemen in
surtouts meet to discuss secular matters in this nineteenth century,
should be made to resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is
here represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to guard
the door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters in full
bloom. Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the room; in
the center, facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and desk of the
president, and on each side a little tribune, from which the clerks
read out documents from time to time. The spectators are accommodated
in niches round t