subject by Don Gaspar Nunez de l'Arce in his drama
played for the first time the past year. In the same palace, continues
Miranda, died Elizabeth of Valois. There Philip IV. had farces played
by ordinary comedians while the tragedy of his own downfall was
enacting without. A fire reduced to ashes the haughty Alcazar at the
moment when the Austrian dynasty disappeared from the realm, and
on its ruins Philip V., first of the Spanish Bourbons, built the
sumptuous palace that exists today. Stranger tenants even than its
predecessor's it was fated to see--Riperda, Farinelli, Godoy, who
began his political rise by his skill with the guitar; and Joseph
Bonaparte, to whom his fraternal patron said, "Brother, you will have
better lodgings now than mine." There Ferdinand VII. passed his life
in breaking his word, and there reigned Isabella II., first adored,
then execrated. Marshal Serrano established there his modest
headquarters as regent of a provisory kingdom, and there lived Amadeo,
who had the spirit to quit a throne which he could not occupy with
dignity. What a story of changed times and manners does it tell, when,
in a detached wing of this royal edifice, we find installed Don Emilio
Castelar, foreign minister of the Spanish republic!

* * * * *

"I must be cruel, only to be kind," says Hamlet. In a different sense
the kindness of some people is pretty sure to be cruel, their very
charity ferocious. There is a story of an old maiden lady whose
affection was centred on an ugly little cur, which one morning bounded
into her room with a biscuit in his chops. "Here, Jane," cries the
good lady, twisting the tidbit out of his mouth and giving it to her
maid, "throw away the bread--it may be poisoned; or stop, put it in
your pocket, and give it to the first poor little beggar you find
in the street!" The story is hardly overdrawn, for if "all mankind's
concern is charity," as Pope says, yet at least some of mankind's
methods of exhibiting generosity are questionable. An English paper
recounts that a Croydon pork-butcher was lately arrested for selling
diseased pork, and the man from whom he bought the pig, being summoned
as a witness, admitted that the animal had been killed "because it was
not very well"--that he was just about to bury the carcass when the
butcher opportunely came and bought it; but the strange point is that,
in a burst of munificence, "the head had already been given to a poor