“Don’t they keep any pump-handle?” asked Murray.
“I never saw any,” laughed the surgeon. “The customers are allowed to put in the water to their own taste, which I think is the best arrangement.”
“I saw plenty of cook-shops, like those in Paris,” said Sheridan. “In one a cook was frying something like Yankee doughnuts.”
“If you got up early enough to visit the breakfast-stalls of the poorer people, you would have been interested. A cheap chocolate takes the place of coffee, which with bread forms the staple of the diet. But the shops are dirty and always full of tobacco-smoke. The higher classes in Spain are not so much given to feasting and dining out as the English and Americans. They are too poor to do it, and perhaps have no taste for such expensive luxuries. The tertulia is a kind of evening party that takes the place of the dinner to some extent, and is a cosa de España. Ladies and gentlemen are invited,—except to literary occasions, which are attended only by men,—and the evening is passed in card-playing and small talk. Lemonade, or something of the kind, is the only refreshment furnished.
“They go home sober, then,” laughed Murray.
“Spaniards always go home sober; but they do not even have wine at the tertulia.”
“I have heard a great deal said about the siesta in Spain; and I have read that the shops shut up, and business ceased entirely, for two or three hours in the middle of the day,” said Sheridan; “but I did not see any signs of the suspension of business in Madrid.”
“Very many take their siesta, even in Madrid; and in the hot weather you would find it almost as you have described it,—as quiet as Sunday,” replied the doctor.
“Sunday was about as noisy a day as any in Madrid,” added Murray.