Madrid--The Fonda and its Porter--The Puerta del Sol--Postal Irregularities--Tribute to the Madrileños--The Barber's Pronunciamiento--Anecdotes of King Amadeus--Checkmating the Grand Dames--Queen Isabella--The Embarrassed Mr. Layard of Nineveh--The Great Powers Hesitate--America Goes Ahead--General Sickles--Mahomet and the Mountain--Republicanism among the troops--A Peculiar Pennsylvanian Dentist--Castelar under Torture--The Writer meets one of his Sept--Politicians by Trade--Honour among Insurgents--Alonso the Reckless. First impressions of Madrid, "the only court," do not fill the visitor with awe. It is an aggregate of masonry, fragmentary on the edges, compact in the middle, on a sandy plateau in a waste of arid landscape. There is lack of natural shade and water, albeit there are tree-planted walks and gardens, with cedars and Himalayan pines, and fountains with fulness of clear flow are abundant. It wants a river; the Manzanares, I am told, is but a ditch. I do not know if that is so; I never could see the Manzanares. A rugged, sun-blistered city, Madrid struck me as no more characteristically Spanish--or what I had taught myself to accept as such--than Turin is Italian; both are half-Frenchified. In the northern distance are the summits of the Guadarrama hills, and the unseen breeze which sweeps down from its snowy eyries amongst them cuts like an icicle. The Madrileño fears it, for it has a trick of permeating the streets with a subtile, chilling, killing breath; and when the Madrileño steps from the sunny to the shady side of the street he is careful to lift a corner of his cloak as screen to his mouth.