"If you want to see real Spain," said the British Minister to me, "don't stop here longer than you can help. Go south." That fixed me. With a natural impulsiveness I pronounced "the imperial and crowned, very noble and very loyal and very heroic town"--all which titles it bears--a fraud and a failure as far as my calling was concerned. There had been great cry and little wool. I was as churlish as a hangman cheated of his client. That terrible thing which was perpetually on the eve of coming to pass had not come to pass. After all, I reflected, it was for the better; for if there had been stupendous tidings to wire, the Government telegraphic system would have broken down under the operation. A message more than twenty lines long was a shock to the clerks, and set them discussing so excitedly that they let the fire of their cigarettes die out. The "only court" grew hateful to my mind. It had produced no men to charm by, save Frey Lope de Vega Carpio, Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and the Maestro Tirso de Molina--and they were dead. It was a nest of political hornets, and head-quarters of hyperbole; flimsy feathers of lying gossip floated thick as midges in midsummer air; as in Athens, the populace spent its leisure, which was the best part of its life, in nothing but hearing or telling new stories. I would shake the dust of the Prado off my feet, in testimony against the unsatisfying capital. Architecturally, it was a higgledy-piggledy of houses on a high bare site; climatically, it was a mixture of furnace and hall of winds; socially, it was slow, and a disappointment; intellectually, it was below zero. My parting words--I cannot say my farewell--will be framed on those of Jugurtha to Rome: "_Urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emtorem invenerit._" I paid a good-bye visit, with thoughts of a stirrup-cup, to Maceehan, at the Fornos, and discovered him listening to Bret Harte's poem of "Table Mountain," recited by Russell Young, who was lolling on a sofa in an upstairs cabinet. The dentist did not seem to "take much stock in it." An appreciation of the horrors of Chinese cheap labour requires a liberal antecedent education on the Pacific slope. Dr. Maceehan was, for his own sake, sincerely sorry I was going away; but for my sake he was glad, as I had been overworking myself, and was badly in want of a kick in the liver. It is an error to speak of any city or people when you are under the influence of sluggish bile, for you are liable to do them injustice. It is a sin not to withdraw the unjust words. I am tempted to sin; but on consideration I follow the example familiar in a certain legislature, and take back the unparliamentary language into which I have been betrayed by jecoral derangement. Honour to the manes of Uxem-Ali-Beck, Ambassador from the Shah of Persia, who came to Madrid in 1601, and fell in love there. He liked it. I fell in love ten times a day, but nobody would fall in love with me.