to shame if anything could. Ordinarily you could get cabs anywhere, but
if you wanted one very badly, when remote from a stand, there was more
than one chance that a cab marked _Libre_ would pass you with lordly
indifference. As for motor taxi-cabs there are none in the city, and at
Cook's they would not take the responsibility of recommending any
automobiles for country excursions.




VII


I linger over these sordid details because I must needs shrink before
the mention of that incomparable gallery, the Museo del Prado. I am
careful not to call it the greatest gallery in the world, for I think of
what the Louvre, the Pitti, and the National Gallery are, and what our
own Metropolitan is going to be; but surely the Museo del Prado is
incomparable for its peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical
associations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet,
by thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only the
breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post
in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter's box in Cambridge
one day, he boasted almost the first thing that the best Titians in the
world were in the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867
not to have my inward question whether there could be anywhere a better
Titian than the "Assumption," but I loved Hay too much to deny him
openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I went
to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right,
triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of