"Not even Mrs. Ewings would believe it," she assured Sylvia. "It's got to be seen to be believed. I opened my mouth a bit wide when I first came to France, but France is Peckham Rye if you put it alongside of Spain. When that guard or whatever he calls himself opened our door and bobbed in out of the runnel with the train going full speed and asked for our tickets, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Showing off, that's what I call it. And carrying wine inside of goats! Disgusting I should say. Nice set-out there'd be in England if the brewers started sending round beer inside of sheep. Why, it would cause a regular outcry; but these Spanish seem to put up with everything. I'm not surprised they come round selling water at every station. The cheek of it though, when you come to think about it. Putting wine inside of goats so as to make people buy water. If I'd have been an enterprising woman like Mrs. Marsham, I should have got out at the last station and complained to the police about it. But really the stations aren't fit for a decent person to walk about in. I'm not considered very particular, but when a station consists of nothing but a signal-box and a lavatory and no platform, I don't call it a station. And what a childish way of starting a train--blowing a toy horn like that. More like a school treat than a railway journey. And the turkeys! Now I ask you, Sylvia, would you believe it? Four turkeys under the seat and three on the rack over me head. A regular Harlequinade! And every time anybody takes out a cigarette or a bit of bread they offer it all around the compartment. Fortunately I don't look hungry, or they might have been offended. No wonder England's full of aliens. I shall explain the reason of it when I get home." The place of entertainment where Sylvia worked was called the Teatro Japonés, for what reason it would have been difficult to say. The girls were, as usual, mostly French, but there were one or two Spanish dancers that, as Mrs. Gainsborough put it, kept one "rum-tum-tumming in one's seat all the time it was going on." Sylvia found Madrid a dull city entirely without romance of aspect, nor did the pictures in the Prado make up for the bull-ring's wintry desolation. Mrs. Gainsborough considered the most remarkable evidence of Spanish eccentricity was the way in which flocks of turkeys, after traveling in passenger-trains, actually wandered about the chief thoroughfares. "Suppose if I was to go shooing across Piccadilly with a herd of chickens, let alone turkeys, well, it _would_ be a circus, and that's a fact."