untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had a liberal
choice of eggs in any form, the delicious _arroz a la Valencia,_ a kind
of risotto, with saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or
beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often melon;
the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I had learned to like in
England. At dinner there were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb, or
poultry, vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was
pretty poor wine _ad libitum_ at both meals. For breakfast there was
good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which if we
sometimes doubted it to be goat's milk we were none the worse if none
the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly ate kid
for lamb.

There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled
by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters. They were not
people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking
mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round as
a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with his
whole back) and he ate with an appetite proportioned to his girth. I
could wish still to know who and what he was, for he was a person very
much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who
let me use my deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came
out with some very fair English which he had been courteously concealing
from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in our corridor, whose
companionship I could desire always to have. One could not be so
confident of the sincerity of the little _camarera_ who slipped out of
the room with a soft, sidelong "_De nada"_ at one's thanks for the hot
water in the morning; but one could stake one's life on the goodness of