The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in society never walk in this long promenade, which is open to all the world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena. After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic. The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way beginning so early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard _baton._ In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when the sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade, the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his _placens uxor_ dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another slumbering in her lap.