e had
been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the
last _espada_ dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last
bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other _toreros,_
the _banderilleros_ with their darts and the picadors with their
disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena. Such
is the force of a high resolve in strangers bent upon a lesson of
civilization to a barbarous people when disappointed of their purpose.
But we learned too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting
in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the
cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they somehow pull
themselves together and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet
in the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the
bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the
fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers
in the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said,
but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who
has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so
to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast; and when
it comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the ring, or the
_espada_ despatching the bull, or the bull tossing a _landerillero_
in the air she puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish
king, who has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems
so eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at all,
sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest at these
supreme moments.

I do not know whether or not it was because we had failed with the
bull-feast that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in
Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some
of those modern plays which I had read so many of, and which I had
translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the
flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was
"Un Drama Nueva," by Estebanez, which between us we called "Yorick's
Love" and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during
the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it
fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do
it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted an