prescriptions are addressed to the apothecaries of other
lands. We were disposed to praise the faculty if not the art for this,
but our doctor forbade. He said it was because the Spanish apothecaries
were so unlearned that they could not read even so little Latin as the
shortest prescription contained. Still I could not think the custom a
bad one, though founded on ignorance, and I do not see why it should not
have made for the greater safety of those who took the medicine if those
who put it up should follow a formula in their native tongue. I know
that at any rate we found the Spanish medicines beneficial and were
presently suffered to go out-of-doors, but with those severe injunctions
against going out after nightfall or opening our lips when we went out
by day. It was rather a bother, but it was fine to feel one's self in
the classic Madrid tradition of danger from pneumonia and to be of the
dignified company of the Spanish gentlemen whom we met with the border
of their cloaks over their mouths; like being a character in a _capa y
espada_ drama.

There was almost as little acted as spoken drama in the streets. I have
given my impression of the songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere,
but if there was no street singing there was often street playing by
pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins. The blind
abound everywhere in Spain in that profession of street beggary which
I always encouraged, believing as I do that comfort in this unbalanced
world cannot be too constantly reminded of misery. As the hunchbacks are
in Italy, or the wooden peg-legged in England, so the blind are in
Spain for number. I could not say how touching the sight of their
sightlessness was, or how the remembrance of it makes me wish that I had
carried more coppers with me when I set out. I would gladly authorize
the reader when he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often neglected;
he will be the better man, or even woman, for it; and he need not mind
if his beneficiary is occasionally unworthy; he may be unworthy himself;
I am sure I was.

But the Spanish street is rarely the theatrical spectacle that the
Italian street nearly always is. Now and then there was a bit in Madrid
which one would be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a civil
magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw pass my cafe window:
a most architectural black hearse, under a black roof, drawn by eight
black horses, sable-plumed. The he