ourselves to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila. But
we never came, and Avila remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers
tawny gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept toward the
Spanish capital.




II


We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by
apprehensions of the _octroi_ which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled
the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage
about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such an
officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their
contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our joy,
to find that in Madrid there was no _octroi_ at all, and that the
amiable _mozos_ who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we
asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of
the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity, so
dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a
motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris, so
like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this
similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us
at the door of the Hotel Ritz.

Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station
welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but
the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and