but if there was no street singing there was often street playing by
pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins. The blind
abound everywhere in Spain in that profession of street beggary which I
always encouraged, believing as I do that comfort in this unbalanced
world cannot be too constantly reminded of misery. As the hunchbacks are
in Italy, or the wooden peg-legged in England, so the blind are in Spain
for number. I could not say how touching the sight of their
sightlessness was, or how the remembrance of it makes me wish that I had
carried more coppers with me when I set out. I would gladly authorize
the reader when he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often neglected;
he will be the better man, or even woman, for it; and he need not mind
if his beneficiary is occasionally unworthy; he may be unworthy himself;
I am sure I was.

But the Spanish street is rarely the theatrical spectacle that the
Italian street nearly always is. Now and then there was a bit in Madrid
which one would be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a civil
magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw pass my cafe window: a
most architectural black hearse, under a black roof, drawn by eight
black horses, sable-plumed. The hearse 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