worth their study, and if I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an idle
old one, I would have asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday
afternoon poring from one of those windows on my well-known world of
Madrid as it babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and
ignorant of that world, I already felt its fascination.

Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days of the week to the
Spanish sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be
distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which is
probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul. The
casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed as much or
as little at work as on any other day. My own casual eye noted that the
most picturesquely evident thing in the city was the country life which
seemed so to pervade it. In the Calle de Alcala, flowing to the Prado
out of the Puerta del Sol, there passed a current of farm-carts and
farm-wagons more conspicuous than any urban vehicles, as they jingled
by, with men and women on their sleigh-belled donkeys, astride or atop
the heavily laden panniers. The donkeys bore a part literally leading in
all the rustic equipages, and with their superior intellect found a way
through the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four large mules
that followed them in harness. Whenever we saw a team of mules without
this sage guidance we trembled for their safety; as for horses, no team
of them attempted the difficult passage, though ox-trains seemed able to
dispense with the path-finding donkeys.

To be sure, the horses abounded in the cabs, which were mostly bad, more
or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of the cabs in Madrid that only the open
victorias have rubber tires; if you go in a coupe you must consent to be
ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels unsoftened. It
"follows as the night the day" that the coupe is not in favor, and that