It is becoming more common for young Spaniards to come to England to finish their education, or to acquire business habits, and the study of the English language is daily becoming more usual. In Spain, as already remarked, no one speaks of the language of the country as "Spanish"; it is always "Castellano," of which neither Valencian, Catalan, Galician, still less Basque, is a dialect--they are all more or less languages in themselves. But Castellano is spoken with a difference both by the _pueblo bajo_ of Madrid and also in the provinces. The principal peculiarities are the omission of the _d_--_prado_ becomes _praö_--in any case the pronunciation of _d_, except as an initial, is very soft, similar to our _th_ in _thee_, but less accentuated. The final _d_ is also omitted by illiterate speakers; _Usted_ is pronounced _Uste_, and even _de_ becomes _e_. _B_ and _v_ are interchangeable. One used to see, on the one-horsed omnibus which in old times represented the locomotion of Madrid, _Serbicio de omnibus_ quite as often as _Servicio_. Over the _venta_ of El Espirito Santo on the road to Alcalá--now an outskirt of Madrid--was written, _Aqui se veve bino y aguaardieñte_--meaning, _Aqui se bebe vino_, etc. (Here may be drunk wine). The two letters are, in fact, almost interchangeable in sound, but the educated Spaniard never, of course, makes the illiterate mistake of transposing them in writing. The sound of _b_ is much more liquid than in English, and to pronounce _Barcelona_ as a Castilian pronounces it, we should spell it _Varcelona_; the same with _Córdoba_, which to our ears sounds as if written _Córdova_, and so, in fact, we English spell it. Spaniards, as a rule, speak English with an excellent accent, having all the sounds that the English possess, taking the three kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland, into account. Our _th_, which is unpronounceable to French, Italians, and Germans, however long they may have lived in England, comes naturally to the Spaniard, because in his own _d_, soft _c_, and _z_ he has the sounds of our _th_ in "_th_ee" and "_th_in." His _ch_ is identical with ours, and his _j_ and _x_ are the same as the Irish and Scotch pronunciation of _ch_ and _gh_.