As for what we call a well-appointed servants’ hall, the case is hopeless in Spanish field or city, and is equally so whether the life be above or below stairs. In the house of the middle or highest classes this is particularly shown in everything that regards gastronomics, which are the tests and touchstones of good service. In truth, the Spaniard, accustomed to his own desultory, free and easy, impromptu, scrambling style of dining, is constrained by the order and discipline, the pomp and ceremony, and serious importance of a well-regulated dinner, and their observance of forms extends only to persons, not to things: even the grandee has only a thin European polish spread over his Gotho-Bedouin dining table; he lives and eats surrounded by an humble clique, in his huge ill-furnished barrack-house, without any elegance, luxury, or even comfort, according to sound trans-pyrenean notions: few indeed are the kitchens which possess a _cordon bleu_, and fewer are the masters who really like an orthodox _entrée_, one unpolluted with the heresies of garlic and red pepper: again, whenever their cookery attempts to be foreign, as in their other imitations, it ends in being a flavourless copy; but few things are ever done in Spain in _real style_, which implies forethought and expense; everything is a make-shift; the noble master _reposes_ his affairs on an unjust steward, and dozes away life on this bed of roses, somnolescent over business and awake only to intrigue; his numerous ill-conditioned, ill-appointed servants have no idea of discipline or subordination; you never can calculate on their laying even the table-cloth, as they prefer idling in the church or market to doing their duty, and would rather starve, dance, and sleep out of place and independently, than feast and earn their wages by fair work; nor has the employer any redress, for if he dismisses them he will only get just such another set, or even worse. [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF SPANISH SERVANTS.] In our own Spanish household, the instant dinner and siesta were over, the cook with his kitchen-man, the valet with the footman invariably stripped off their working apparel--liveries are almost unheard of--donned their comical velvet embroidered hats, their sky-blue waistcoats, and scarlet sashes, and were off with a guitar to some scene of song and love-making, leaving their master alone in his glory to moralize on the uncertainty of human concerns and the faithlessness of mankind. [Sidenote: SPANISH AND ENGLISH MANNERS.] [Sidenote: TRAVELLING EXPENSES.]