The street or roadway is bordered with booths, whose oil illumination casts a fitful and fantastic

glare upon the company. Frequently there is a concurso de mantones, or prize competition of Manila shawls; and maybe an additional prize for the best peinado, or head of hair. Each barrio, or district of the capital, celebrates its own verbena. The number of these festivals, therefore, is tending to increase, but their traditional characteristics are succumbing rapidly; and the time is fast approaching when the mantones de Manila, just as the silks and satins of the manolas, will be merely a recuerdo.

All Saints or "Hallowmas, the short'st of day (November 1st), and the Day of the Dead (Día de los Difuntos, November 2nd), are undisputably the two most dismal anniversaries in the Spanish calendar. They are set apart for visiting the graveyards, saying masses for the dear departed, and laying flowers upon their tombs and niches. By a singular coincidence the weather is almost always bleak and wet, so that the muddy and rain-swept roads, trodden by troops of mourners clad in weeds. and tramping stolidly towards the cemeteries in various attitudes of conventional woe, are infinitely cheerless. It seems a sacrilege to make the bright existence of a flower a partner in so impudent a farce.

What shall I say of Christmas? That it is a season of rejoicing, of theatre-going, and party-giving; of spending heaps of money and making none; but that it is less celebrated, and of course less chilly than in central and northern Europe, and that as a northerner I miss the change proportionally. True,

the streets resound to the music of the comparsas, the tintinnabulation of their panderetas, the tinkling of their guitars and bandurrias, and the rasping of their güiros. The Spanish world is in good humour. There are cakes and ale and revelling in many a household, and a lively expectation dwells upon all faces, for does not everyone look forward to winning the gordo in the lottery? But where are the bracing English night-time air, the horse's head, the holly, and the waits blowing their fingers and stamping their chilblained feet?

This reminds me that a single fashion, abhorred by housekeepers and thrifty souls in general, is equally as common in Spain as in our frigid and commercial north. I mean the aguinaldo, Anglicè Christmas box. As soon as ever Christmas morning comes round, so do your postman, errand-boys, and servitors at large, in order to remind you of the fact. I used to think they would disdain to accept a Christmas box from a mere foreigner. But no. With a charity I can never forget-or forgive-they condoned my alien origin, and rapped upon my door with just as genial an expectation as at my neighbour's, the attorney's, who hails from Murcia. So that with regard to these guileless visitors, I found the same humility, the same benevolent tolerance and good will towards all men blessed with a sixpence or a half peseta, to prevail in Madrid as ever in London; and when I put my hand in my pocket and offered to appease my carbonero's boy's Anglophobe convictions by the bribe of half a duro-he took it, as did the waterseller, the dustman, and the grocer, the newsboy, the telegraph-messenger, the portero, the sereno, and the

washerwoman's girl. Even the fair sex extended their mercy to the stranger that was within their clutches!

This, then, is the closest point of resemblance between a Spanish and an English Christmas-the good will vouchsafed by the poor to the less poor, and the Christian graciousness with which the former spurn not the nobly born," but accept, without a reproving word, the equalizing aguinaldo-however clean the hand which proffers it.

And yet, who am I to institute comparisonsalways odious, according to the maxim, but especially so when perpetrated by the ignorant? Alas! what do I recall of an English Christmas? Have I not forgotten how to pull a cracker, or kiss a girl beneath the mistletoe? I have eaten my plum pudding in South Africa, where the thermometer stood at ninetyseven in the shade and the candle upon my diningtable melted and fell over into my plate; and I have spent, some gay, some grave, how many (plum puddingless) Christmases in Spain, among a kindly folk who wished me well; but my thoughts, do what I would, have travelled back a thousand miles tohome!

I hear the comparsa tramping past my window, and try to imagine that I am listening to a Christmas carol, as once I listened. "The time draws near the birth of Christ." Perhaps the rime is glittering on the trees, and the ground is white and hard, and yielding for a moment to my fancy-or my conscience-I open the window and look out.

No. The air is calm but mild; and that is never

a carol ringing in foreign accents on my ear.

The

skies, too, are painted with unnumbered sparks. They are all fire, and every one doth shine," but their glimmer is without the keen intensity of frost. Something is altered; something lacks. Something! Everything! For the Christmas of my boyhood, "as dear to me as are the ruddy drops that visit my sad heart," was not the same as this.

For me the Christmas of home is dead and in its grave, though there are times when even its memories pursue me, like accusing apparitions, into exile the kindly associations of that mirthful season, the meeting with old friends and kin, the simple pleasure in being happy, and in contriving happiness for others these memories all, with terrible gestures, denounce me as their murderer.

No matter. The punishment must be borne. Do what I will, I cannot make my victims breathe again; and all they were survives for me but as those unsubstantial phantoms of a younger, and a better, and a brighter life!

171

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BULLFIGHT.

HERE is an air about my street which tells me, plainer than any notice in the paper or placard on the wall, that my neighbours are preparing to enjoy themselves. The barber's shop is better patronized than usual, and I observe a number of familiar faces scrupulously scraped that go unshaven all the week. The patatera downstairs is brushing out her mantón de Manila while the boy puts up the shutter, and the privileged chulo who lives upon her earnings and passes for her lawful spouse runs off to call a simón. Surely, too, it was the peinadora I saw emerging from the first-floor gabinete opposite, the private residence of the prestamista, whose three delightful daughters I happen to know are abonadas to the tendidos de sombra of the bull-ring, together with their chaperon and mamma, for paterfamilias, like the busy bee of the maxim, is not to be wooed from his pursuit of golden honey.

The Spaniard attends the bullfight, if he be rich, luxuriously; if poor, modestly; if penniless, fraudulently, scurvily, raggedly, what you will; but by a notable coincidence he is never so poor as not to attend it at all, or at least some portion of it. The aristocrat, handling the ribbons himself, must