arse was open at the sides, with
the coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced _chapeau bras_ lying on
it. Behind came twenty or twenty-five gentlemen on foot in the modern
ineffectiveness of frock-coats and top-hats, and after them eight or ten
closed carriages. The procession passed without the least notice from
the crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of emulation
in its small boys by companies of infantry marching to the music of
sharply blown bugles. The men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but
not so handsome as the English, and in figure they were not quite the
deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. Their bugles, with the
rhythmical note which the tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins
of the blind minstrels, made the only street music I remember in Madrid.

Between the daily rains, which came in the afternoon, the sun was
sometimes very hot, but it was always cool enough indoors. The indoors
interests were not the art or story of the churches. The intensest
Catholic capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in nothing more
than the reputed uninterestingness of its churches. I went into one of
them, however, with a Spanish friend, and I found it beautiful, most
original, and most impressive for its architecture and painting, but
I forget which church it was. We were going rather a desultory drive
through those less frequented parts of the city which I have mentioned
as like a sort of muted Naples: poor folk living much out-of-doors,
buying and selling at hucksters' stands and booths, and swarming about
the chief market, where the guilty were formerly put to death, but the
innocent are now provisioned. Outside the market was not attractive, and
what it was within we did not look to see. We went rather to satisfy
my wish to see whether the Manzanares is as groveling a stream as the
guide-books pretend in their effort to give a just idea of the natural
disadvantages of Madrid, as the only great capital without an adequate
river. But whether abetted by the arts of my friend or not, the
Manzanares managed to conceal itself from me; when we left our carriage
and went to look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and falls which
it possibly fed and which lent their beauty to the charming up and down
hill walks, now a public pleasaunce, but formerly the groves and gardens
of the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from him and Italian from me
was of Tolstoy and several esthetic and spiri