But the watchmen are merciful. They are called, as elsewhere, serenos, which may mean either "quiet," or "night-dews," but their function in Madrid is peculiar. Early in the evening they come out by squads, with staves of office, and at their girdles bright lanterns and an immense bunch of keys. These are the night-keys of all the houses on each man's beat, the residents not being allowed to have any. When a person returns home late—and who does not, in Madrid—he is obliged to find his sereno, and if that officer is not in sight, calls him by name—"Frascuelo," or "Pepino." Whereupon Frascuelo, or Pepino, or Santiago, if he hears, will come along and unlock the door. This curious system should at least encourage good habits; for, unless a man be sober, his watchman may have unpleasant tales to tell of him.
The feline race being too often homeless, and having a proverbial taste for nocturnal wanderings, the average male citizen of the capital feelingly nicknames himself a "Madrid cat." This shows a frankness of self-characterization, to say the least, unusual. Of course there is home life, and there is family affection, in Madrid, but the stranger naturally does not see a great deal of these; and then it may be doubted whether they really exist to the same extent as in most other civilized capitals. It becomes wearisome to make sallies upon the town, and day after day find so much of the population trying to divert itself, or killing time in the cafés and clubs. The feeling deepens that they resort to these for want of a sufficiently close interest in their homes. More than that, they do not seem really to be amused. Even their language fails to express the amusement idea; the most that anything can be for them, in the vernacular, is "entertaining." Still the choice of light diversion is varied enough. Opera flourishes in winter; in spring and summer the bull-fight; theatres are always in blast; cocking-mains are kept up. Hitherto gambling has been another favorite pastime until checked by the authorities. Not content with all this, the Madrileños seek in lottery shops that excitement which Americans derive from drinking-saloons. The brightly lighted lottery agency occurs as frequently as that other indication of disease, the apothecary's window, or the stock-market "ticker," in American cities. People of all classes hover about them both by day and by night. Posters confront you with announcements of the Child Jesus Lottery, the lottery to aid the Asylum of Our Lady of the Assumption, or the National, which is drawn thrice a month, with a chief prize of thirty-two thousand dollars, and some four hundred other premiums. There are many small drawings besides constantly going on: not a day passes, in fact, without your being solicited by wandering dealers in these alluring chances at least half a dozen times.
Altogether, looking from my balcony upon the characteristic crowd in the great square, leading this life so busy yet so apathetic, as if in a slow fever, Madrid struck me as only one more great human ant-hill, where the ants were trying to believe themselves in Paris. The Parisian resemblance, however, is confined to strips through the middle and on the edges of the city, and as soon as one's steps are bent away from those, the narrow ways and older architecture of Spain re-appear. Only a few rods from the Puerta del Sol lies the Plaza Mayor, which once enjoyed all the honors of bull-fights and heretic burnings—occasions on which householders were obliged by their leases to give up all the front rooms and balconies to be used as boxes for the audience. From the Plaza Mayor again an arch leads into Toledo Street—old meandering mart full of mantles and sashes, blankets and guitars, flannel dyed in the national colors of red and yellow, basket-work and wood-work, including the carved sticks known as molinillos (little mills), with which chocolate is mixed by a dexterous spinning motion. The donkey feels himself at home once more in these narrow thoroughfares; the evil sewage smell, which oozes through even the most pretentious edifices in the new quarters, diffuses itself again in full vigor, and the cafés become dingy and unconventional. On the Alcalá, or San Geronimo, the carefully-dressed men sip beer and cordials, or possibly indulge in sparkling sherry—a new and expensive wine like dry champagne; but here the rougher element is satisfied with aguardiente (the liquor distilled from anise-seed), and quite as often confines itself to water. The lower orders are temperate. Peasants and porters and petty traders will sit down contentedly for a whole evening to a glass of water in which is dissolved a long meringue (called asucarillo, literally "sugarette"), or to a snow lemonade. Another esteemed cooling beverage is the horchata de chufas, a kind of cream made from pounded cypress root and then half frozen. The height of luxury is to order with this, at an added cost of some two cents, a few tubular wafers, fancifully named barquillos (or little boats), through which the semi-liquid may be sucked. This barquillo is considered so desirable that boys carry it on the street in large metal cylinders, the top of which is a disk inscribed with numbers. You pay a fee, and he revolves on the disk a pivotal needle, the number at which it stops deciding how many wafers fall to your lot. In this way the excruciating pleasure of barquillos to eat is combined with the national delight in gaming.
European costume has fallen on the Madrid people like a pall, blotting out picturesqueness; but peasants of all provinces are still seen, and now and then a turbaned figure from Barbary moves across the street. Nor is the fascinating mantilla quite extinct among women, in spite of their more than Parisian grace and splendor of modern robing. There are humble old women squatted on the sidewalk at street corners, who sell water and liquors and shrub from bottles kept in a singular little stand with brass knobs like an exaggerated pair of casters; and when one sees the varied types of peasant, soldier, citizen, or priest, with perhaps a veiled woman of the middle class, gathered around one of these, the Spanish quality of the town re-asserts itself distinctly. So it does, too, when a carriage containing the princesses of the royal household rattles down the Prado Park, drawn by mules in barbaric red-tasselled harness, and preceded by a courier who wears a sort of gold-braided nightcap.
There is no cathedral at Madrid, but the churches, smeared as usual with gold and stucco and paint in tasteless extravagance, are numerous enough; and on many a balcony I saw withered straw-like plumes, long as a man, hung up in commemoration of the last Palm-Sunday. The morning papers have a "religious bulletin" in the amusement column, giving the saints and services of the day; besides which special masses for the souls of departed capitalists are constantly announced, with a request that friends shall attend. These paid rites doubtless offer a pleasant exception to the routine of commonplace church-going. Thus, while the men are absorbed by their cafés and politics, their countless cigarettes and lottery tickets, with a minimum of business and a maximum of dominoes, the women fill up their time with matins and vespers, confessions and intrigues. It would be merely repeating the frank assertion of the Spanish men themselves to say that feminine morals here are in a lamentable state; but at least appearances are always carefully guarded, and if judged by externals only, Madrid is far more virtuous than London or Paris. As for local society, it exists so much on appearances that the substance suffers. It is true, the ladies are beautiful and of noble stature; and their costumes, governed by the happiest taste, surpass in luxury those seen in public in almost any other city. The cavaliers are, without exception, the best-dressed gentlemen in the world; and the mass of sumptuous equipages, with polished grooms and surpassingly fine horses, which crowds the broad Castilian Fountain drive, or the Park road on the east of the Buen Retiro gardens, during fashionable hours, is amazing. Great wealth is gathered in the hands of a few nobles, who often draw heavy salaries from government for long-obsolete services; but the most of this costuming and grooming is attained by semi-starvation at home. By consequence, dinners and dancing-parties are rarely given even in the season, and royalty itself provides no more than a couple of balls, with two or three state dinners, a year.
To be sure, no capital is better provided with sundry of the higher means to cultivation, as its Royal Armory, its Archæological Museum, and its glorious Picture-gallery—in some respects the noblest of Europe—remind one. Moreover, in the neighboring Escorial, that dark jewel in the head of Philip II., travellers find a rich monument of art, albeit to many eyes unseen inscriptions perhaps record there more than enough of Spain's misfortunes. In the Madrid gallery the stately, severe, and robust royal portraits by Velazquez, or his magnificently healthy "Drunkards," reveal in their way, as do the Virgins of Murillo, floating divinely in translucent air, that deep and deathless power of Spanish temperament and genius over which slumber has reigned so long. The pictures of Ribera, hanging together, are like loose pages torn from Spanish ecclesiastical history and legend: a collection of monks, ascetics, martyrs—scenes of torture depicted with relentless and savage vigor. Goya, again, scarcely known out of Spain, left at the beginning of this century portraits of wonderful vitality and finish, fresh glimpses of popular life, and wild figure compositions marked by the fierce, half insane energy of a Latinized William Blake. His imagination and manner were both original. Though falling short, like all other Spanish painters, in ideality, he had that faculty of fertile improvisation so refreshing in Murillo's naturalistic "Madonna of the Birdling," or in his "St. Elizabeth," and "Roman Patrician's Dream," at the Academy of Fine Arts. But it is not with these past splendors, still full of hopes for new futures, that the Castilian gentlemen and ladies of our varnished period concern themselves. The opera, the circus, and the Corrida de Toros—the irrepressible bull-fight—are to them of far more consequence.