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There are some curious superstitions, however, about being abroad when the clocks strike twelve, which we must suppose do not now affect the Madrileño. The Queen Regent and her daughters, but not often the King, now visit in turn some of the churches, but without the old state or regularity.
It was a simple dinner and a little stodgy for that time of the year, but the two men were hungry and sat at table, almost alone in the upper room, for a long time, saying how good everything was, and from time to time despatching the saturnine waiter, a Madrileno, for more peppers.
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 Madrileño 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.
The position of Madrid at the apex of a high table-land, two thousand one hundred and sixty feet above the level of the sea, with its wide expanse of plain on every hand but that on which the Guadarramas break the horizon with their rugged, often snow-capped, peaks, naturally exposes it to rapid changes of temperature; that is to say, that if the snow is still lying on the Sierra, and the wind should chance to blow from that direction on Madrid, which is steeped in sunshine winter and summer for far the greater part of the year, there is nothing to break its course, and naturally, a Madrileño, crossing from the sheltered corner, where he has been "taking the sun," to the shady side of the street and the full force of the chilly blast, will be very likely to "catch an air," as the Spaniard expresses it.
If it be meant as a term of reproach, the Madrileño has an excellent answer in giving the history of its origin.
The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose red eyelids showed lack of sleep, was weeping copiously. He claimed to be a madrileno which was evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain and Panama all his life without ever before having been arrested which was possible. He was merely one of many drivers for a livery-stable owner in Panama.
In attempting to understand the extremely complex character of the Spaniard as we know him, that is to say, the Castilian, or rather the Madrileño, one has to take into account not only the divers races which go to make up the nationality as it is to-day, but something of the past history of this strangely interesting people.
In speaking of the national characteristics, one must be taken to mean, not by any means the Madrileño, but the countrymen, whose homes are not to be judged by the posadas, or inns, which exist mainly for the muleteer and his animals, and are neither clean nor savoury.
The Church is lord of the holidays for the rest of the year. In the middle of May comes the feast of the ploughboy patron of Madrid, San Isidro. He was a true Madrileno in tastes, and spent his time lying in the summer shade or basking in the winter sunshine, seeing visions, while angels came down from heaven and did his farm chores for him.
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