interpreter at Madrid to get my ticket stamped at the ticket-office; it
required merely the presentation of the ticket at the window; but the
interpreter seemed to wish it and it enabled him to practise his English
with me, and I realized that he must live. In a peseta's worth of
gratitude he followed us to our carriage, and he did not molest the
_mozo_ in putting our bags into the racks, though he hovered about the
door till the train started; and it just now occurs to me that he may
have thought a peseta was not a sufficient return for his gratitude; he
had rendered us no service.

At Aranjuez the wheat-lands, which began to widen about us as soon as we
got beyond the suburbs of Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens of
that really charming pleasaunce, charming quite from the station, with
grounds penetrated by placid waters overhung by the English elms which
the Castilians are so happy in having naturalized in their treeless
waste. Multitudes of nightingales are said to sing among them, but it
was not the season for hearing them from the train; and we made what
shift we could with the strawberry and asparagus beds which we could
see plainly, and the peach trees and cherry trees. One of these had
committed the solecism of blossoming in October, instead of April or
May, when the nobility came to their villas.

We had often said during our stay in Madrid that we should certainly
come for a day at Aranjuez; and here we were, passing it with a five
minutes' stop. I am sure it merited much more, not only for its many
proud memories, but for its shameful ones, which are apt to be so much
more lasting in the case of royal pleasaunces. The great Catholic
King Ferdinand inherited the place with the Mastership of the Order of
Santiago; Charles V. used to come there for the shooting, and Philip
II., Charleses III. and IV., and Ferdinand VII. built and rebuilt its
edifices. But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there
with the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and there the
pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abominable son Ferdinand VII.
It is the careful Murray who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who
apparently fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes
it with the remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to
the royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which he
held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume's _Modern Spain_ I learn
tha