But We Never Came, And Avila Remains A Vision Of Walls And Roofs And Towers Tawny Gray Glimpsed In A Rift Of The Storm That Again Swept Toward The Spanish Capital.

II We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by apprehensions of the _octroi_ which we felt sure awaited us.

We recalled the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our joy, to find that in Madrid there was no _octroi_ at all, and that the amiable _mozos_ who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity, so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris, so like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us at the door of the Hotel Ritz.

Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and the rooms were warm.

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