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 hearse was open at the sides, with the
coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced _chapeau bras_ lying on it.
Behind came twenty or twenty-five gentlemen on foot in the modern
ineffectiveness of frock-coats and top-hats, and after them eight or ten
closed carriages. The procession passed without the least notice from
the crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of emulation
in its small boys by companies of infantry marching to the music of
sharply blown bugles. The men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but
not so handsome as the English, and in figure they were not quite the
deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. Their bugles, with the
rhythmical note which the tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins
of the blind minstrels, made the only street music I remember in Madrid.
Between the daily rains, which came in the afternoon, the sun was
sometimes very hot, but it was always cool enough indoors. The indoors
interests were not the art or story of the churches. The intensest
Catholic capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in nothing more
than the reputed uninterestingness of its churches.
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