The construction of the houses, for the most {190} part rapidly run up to meet the sudden increase of the population--the Court, as has been explained, attracting everybody in Spain with brains, ambition, or money--was extremely mean and shabby, the heavy ostentatious palaces of the nobles, many of which still stand, being surrounded by wretched little shanties with mud walls and filthy exteriors.[13] The windows towards the street were heavily grated, and mostly small, which gave a gloomy dungeon-like appearance to the buildings, whilst the total absence of drainage made the roadways a mere middenheap, through which the heavy coaches ploughed, and bespattered the pedestrians. To the enormous number of strangers and foreigners whom curiosity, politics, or business brought to Madrid at this period, the filthy condition of the streets became a byword. The gutters of the houses projecting far out from the eaves threw great jets of water when it rained into the middle of the narrow roadways, and with the mere warning of "_Agua va_" all the house garbage, debris, and excrement were cast forth into the open street, there to fester until the salutary sun had deodorised it and reduced it to dust. In these streets, and especially in the portion of the Calle Mayor near the Church of St. Philip and the Puerta del Sol, the idlers of the capital, {191} which meant the greater part of the population, loved to promenade for hours every day, preferably in coaches, bandying coarse jests with the people on foot. This objectless promenading and gossiping was so characteristic that a special verb was coined to describe it, namely, to _ruar_. Everybody pretended to be wealthier, more highly placed, and better dressed than he really was; and though sumptuary pragmatics and decrees, announced by heralds in the Calle Mayor, constantly threatened transgressors with all sorts of pains and penalties, the people, especially the women, continued to defy the law in their dress and behaviour. The insolent dames would wear outrageous garments; flattened farthingales (_guardainfantes_) so immensely wide as to be indecent, starched ruffs, pattens so high with jingling heels as to be like musical stilts, and would still insist upon covering their faces, all but one eye, the more to pique curiosity and indulge with impunity in their not too delicate badinage.