This summery month of June is rich in saints. The great apostles, John, Peter, and Paul, have their anniversaries on its closing days, and the shortest nights of the year are given up to the riotous eating of fritters in their honor. I am afraid that the progress of luxury and love of ease has wrought a change in the observance of these festivals. The feast of midsummer night is called the Verbena of St. John, which indicates that it was formerly a morning solemnity, as the vervain could not be hunted by the youths and maidens of Spain with any success or decorum at midnight. But of late years it may be that this useful and fragrant herb has disappeared from the tawny hills of Castile. It is sure that midsummer has grown too warm for any field work. So that the Madrilenos may be pardoned for spending the day napping, and swarming into the breezy Prado in the light of moon and stars and gas. The Prado is ordinarily the promenade of the better classes, but every Spanish family has its John, Paul, and Peter, and the crowded barrios of Toledo and the Penue-las pour out their ragged hordes to the popular festival. The scene has a strange gypsy wildness. From the round point of Atocha to where Cybele, throned among spouting waters, drives southward her spanking team of marble lions, the park is filled with the merry roysterers. At short intervals are the busy groups of fritter merchants; over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oil; beside it a mighty bowl of dough. The bunolero, with the swift precision of machinery, dips his hand into the bowl and makes a delicate ring of the tough dough, which he throws into the bubbling caldron. It remains but a few seconds, and his grimy acolyte picks it out with a long wire and throws it on the tray for sale. They are eaten warm, the droning cry continually sounding, "Bunuelos! Calientitos!" There must be millions of these oily dainties consumed on every night of the Verbena. For the more genteel revellers, the Don Juans, Pedros, and Pablos of the better sort, there are improvised restaurants built of pine planks after sunset and gone before sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a striking and vivid picture. The city is more than usually quiet. The stir of life is localized in the Prado. The only busy men in town are those who stand by the seething oil-pots and manufacture the brittle forage of the browsing herds. It is a jealous business, and requires the undivided attention of its professors. The _ne sutor ultra crepidam_ of Spanish proverb is "Bunolero haz tus bunuelos,"--Fritterman, mind thy fritters.