Yet for all the noise and all the business, there is upon the town a subtle and a gentle quiet. This assertiveness is only for itself: it is a heightened murmur of assent to Spain’s rich past. Beneath the bruit, Madrid is silent, like Spain’s history. Beneath its animal turbulence it broods. And for all its mingled moods, its final one is a dream. On Sundays, the _rastro_--the great city fair--boils down hill, a human torrent through a canyon of tattered houses to the dry _Manzanares_. On feast days in spring or summer, the town roars at the bull-ring. And when the last death is written in the sands, it swarms in lorries, motors, tally-hos, back to the Plaza de la Cíbeles; it spreads in numberless café tables on the broad sidewalks of the Alcalá. The Puerta del Sol--theater of revolutions--is a somber well whose sides are gray soiled houses and whose crowds are a thick condiment. Trolleys, lottery vendors, beggars, loafers, make a bright shuttle through the sluggish maze. At the Carnival of Spring, the gutters of the barrios de Toledo and de Manzanares pour their lives into the Castellana. Rogues, prostitutes, shopgirls, mothers with babes at the breast flow back and forth under the statue of Columbus and the austere walls of the Biblioteca Nacional: queer costumes grimace through confetti clouds; a murmur of sexual release agglutinates the swarms; a glow as of rich earth breaking to grass rises beneath the sere March sky.... And yet, there is a silence, there is a stillness on Madrid. The songs of the turbulent streets are songs of silence. This parade of pleasures and of passions, of crimes and revolutions, is somnambular. Populous Madrid falls from the Plaza Mayor fan-wise to the arid curve of river upon whose treeless banks are stuck the shanties of the breadless. And above the river and the shanties is the Palace of the King, a cold and granite jewel set upon misery. If you would see it well, go down to where the starving _madrileños_ stack their huts and air their tattered shirts--ironic flags under the flag of Spain.