If you called on a Spanish gentleman, and, finding him out, wished afterwards to write him a note, and inquired of his man or maid servant the number of the house;--“I do not know, my lord,” was the invariable answer, “I never was asked it before, I have never looked for it: let us go out and see. Ah! it is number 36.” Wishing once to send a parcel by the wagon from Merida to Madrid, “On what day, my lord,” said I to the potbellied, black-whiskered _ventero_, “does your _galera_ start for the Court?” “Every Wednesday,” answered he; “and let not your grace be anxious”--“_Disparate_--nonsense,” exclaimed his copper-skinned, bright-eyed wife, “why do you tell the English knight such lies? the wagon, my lord, sets out on Fridays.” During the logomachy, or the few words which ensued between the well-matched pair, our good luck willed, that the _mayoral_ or driver of the vehicle should come in, who forthwith informed us that the days of departure were Thursdays; and he was right. This occurred in the provinces; take, therefore, a parallel passage in the capital, the heart and brain of the Castiles. “_Señor, tenga Usted la bondad_--My lord,” said I to a portly, pompous bureaucrat, who booked places in the dilly to Toledo,--“have the goodness, your grace, to secure me one for Monday, the 7th.”--“I fear,” replied he, politely, for the _negocio_ had been prudently opened by my offering him a real Havannah, “that your lordship has made a mistake in the date. Monday is the 8th of the current month”--which it was not. Thinking to settle the matter, we handed to him, with a bow, the almanack of the year, which chanced to be in our pocket-book. “_Señor_,” said he, gravely, when he had duly examined it, “I knew that I was right; this one was printed at Seville,”--which it was--“and we are here at Madrid, which is _otra cosa_, that is, altogether another affair.” In this solar difference and pre-eminence of the Court, it must be remembered, that the sun, at its creation, first shone over the neighbouring city, to which the dilly ran; and that even in the last century, it was held to be heresy at Salamanca, to say that it did not move round Spain. In sad truth, it has there stood still longer than in astronomical lectures or metaphors. Spain is no paradise for calculators; here, what ought to happen, and what would happen elsewhere according to Cocker and the doctrine probabilities, is exactly the event which is the least likely to come to pass. One arithmetical fact only can be reckoned upon with tolerable certainty: let given events be represented by numbers; then two and two may at one time make three, or possibly five at another; but the odds are four to one against two and two ever making four; another safe rule in Spanish official numbers; _e. g._ “five thousand men killed and wounded”--“five thousand dollars will be given,” and so forth, is to deduct two noughts, and sometimes even three, and read fifty or five instead.