Until after Christmas the winter in Madrid is charming, even if it be cold; the glorious sunshine from dawn to sunset, the fine exhilarating air, raise one’s spirits unconsciously; but very often the old year is dead before any real cold comes on.  I have sat out in the Buen Retiro many a day in December with book or work, and scarcely any more wrap than one wears in summer in England.  After that there is generally a cold, and perhaps disagreeable, spell, when the wind comes howling across the plains straight from the snow and ice, and the Madrileno thinks it terrible; as a matter of fact, so long as the sky remains clear, there is always one side of the street where one can be warm.  Sometimes, but not often, the cold weather or the bitter winds last pretty far into the spring, and it has certainly happened in the depth of the frost that one of the sentries on duty at the Palace, on the side facing the mountains, was found frozen to death when the relief came.  After that the watch was made shorter, and the change of guard more frequent in winter.  I have seen the Estanque Grande in the Retiro covered with ice several inches thick; but as all Madrid turned out to see the wonder and watch the foreigners skate, a thing that appeared never to have been seen before, it could not have been a very common occurrence.

Riding early in the morning in winter outside Madrid, even with the sun shining brightly and a cloudless sky, the cold was often intense, especially in the dells and hollows.  We have often had to put our hands under the saddle to keep them from freezing, so as to be able to feel the reins, and if I were riding with the sun on the off-side, my feet would become perfectly dead to feeling.  But what an air it was!  Something to be remembered, and long before we reached home we were in a delicious glow.  The horses, English thoroughbreds, enjoyed it immensely, and went like the wind.  I have been in Madrid in every part of the year, and never found it unbearably hot, though one does not generally wait for July or August; but here again the lightness and dryness of the air seem to make heat much easier to bear.  Numbers of Madrid people think nothing of remaining there all the summer through.

CHAPTER V

MODERN MADRID

Madrid has grown out of all knowledge in the last thirty years.  No one who had not seen it since the time of Isabel II. would recognise it now, and even then much had been done since Ferdinand VII. had come back from his fawning and despicable captivity in France—­where he had gloried in calling himself a “French prince”—­to act the despot in his own country.  The Liberal Ministers who, for short periods, had some semblance of power during the regency of Cristina had done a little to restore the civilisation and light established by Charles III., and wholly quenched in the time of his unworthy and contemptible successors.  But