The Carnival--About Kissing Feet--Mummers and Masquers--The Paseo de Recoletos--The Writer is taken for Cluseret--Incongruity in Costume--Shrove Tuesday--Panic on the Prado--A Fancy Ball--The "Entierro de la Sardina"--Lenten Amusements--A Spanish Mystery--"Pasion y Muerte de Jesus"--Of the Stage Stagey--Critical Remarks. Simultaneously with the Ministerial crisis we were tortured by the throes of the Carnival, which was a trial too great for a Republic so young. But the weather came to the aid of the powers that were, and prevented the festival from rising to a height of merriment when it might become tumultuous. The opening day was one of leaden skies and moist pavements in the forenoon, of little patches of ultramarine above and little eruptions of noise below in the afternoon. There is one consolation on a wet day--you can conveniently make inspection of the extremities of dear womankind. I no longer elevate my eyebrows at the Spanish formula of compliment to the mistress of one's affections--"I kiss your feet." Anyone could kiss them with pleasure; they are so tiny, shapely, and sylph-like. There surely are the "little mice" of Suckling's ballad! Atalanta must have had ankles like those revealed under the lifted skirts of the doncella yonder, Cinderella such another pair of arched insteps. But one cannot contemplate them for ever, bitten by the statuary's mania for the symmetric though he be. On the second morning, there was a light grey fog, like the smoke after gunpowder, on the square called "The Gate of the Sun." I have tasted the joys of Carnival elsewhere--at Rome in Papal times and at Paris in Imperial times--but never did the tomfoolery like me less. Muggy weather, miserable Carnival. No showers of _confetti_, no procession of the _bœuf gras_ even. Here and there the orchestras of the theatres, clad in the cast-off finery of the supernumeraries thereof, parade the streets, and make dissonance with their instruments. Very German-bandish this dissonance sounds, with a variety of horror thrown in liberally in the shape of tambourines and triangles. One corps of mumming musicians is dressed as Zouaves; another might be directors of a Funeral Company, so sad their garments; a third is got up in a costume semi-nightshirt, semi-dressing-gown; all send out agents to tout for _backsheesh_. That is their great point of resemblance. The masquers are few in the streets, and, such as they are, wear their motley as if for pay, not for pastime. They are of the usual order, Pierrots, Polichinelles, and cavaliers, with no wigs, with powdered wigs, and with curly wigs, and with vizors hideous or ghastly, or simply droll and grotesque. Among the latter are some which might have been designed by Dykwnkyn for a Drury Lane pantomime; but the individual who carried off the palm of burlesque was an equestrian I met in the Plaza Mayor, looking like one of the men