t it would rain in
the afternoon, and if greater experience than ours had not instructed
us that there would be many days of thick fog now before the climate of
Madrid settled itself to the usual brightness of February. We had time
to note again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fashionable drive,
that it consists of four rows of acacias and tamarisks and a stretch
of lawn, with seats beside it; the rest is bare grasslessness, with a
bridle-path on one side and a tram-line on the other. If it had been
late afternoon the Paseo would have been filled with the gay world, but
being the late forenoon we had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go
back to our hotel, where the excellent midday breakfast merited the best
appetite one could bring to it.

In fact, all the meals of our hotel were good, and of course they were
only too superabundant. They were pretty much what they were everywhere
in Spain, and they were better everywhere than they were in Granada
where we paid most for them. They were appetizing, and not of the
cooking which the popular superstition attributes to Spain, where the
hotel cooking is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper, as the
untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had a liberal
choice of eggs in any form, the delicious _arroz a la Valencia,_ a
kind of risotto, with saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or
beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often melon;
the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I had learned to like in
England. At dinner there were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb,
or poultry, vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was
pretty poor wine _ad libitum_ at both meals. For breakfast there was
good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which if we
sometimes doubted it to be goat's milk we were none the worse if none
the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly ate kid
for lamb.

There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled
by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters. They were
not people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking
mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round
as a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck
which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with
his whole back) and he ate with an