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Updated: May 7, 2025
Fascinating road-houses of stucco walls curtained behind a profusion of clambering roses tempt one to pause and take his ease to the tinkle of guitars and mandolins. But Aunt Sarah and the girls, ever bent upon reaching the next cathedral with a stained glass window or the next dingy canvas of a saint sitting on a cloud, were scarcely amenable to the lure of road-house temptation.
I have given my impression of the songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere, but if there was no street singing there was often street playing by pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins.
Probably it was because nobody could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "Ostreche! Fresche! Ostreche!" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "Ecco me!
An orchestra of negro musicians were rattling away on banjos, mandolins, and singing obligatos in deep-voiced improvisations. The drummer and the cymbalist were the busiest of all; their rattling, clanging, banging addition to the music gave it an irresistible rhythmic cadence. Even Burke felt the call of the dance, until he studied the evolutions of the merrymakers.
The noise first rose to us, hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory of her sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which seemed to have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It was not a largo boat, but it managed to contain two men with mandolins, a mother of a family with a guitar, and a young girl with an alternate tambourine and umbrella.
Bethune turned to Jake. "You had better come. The card states there'll be music, and the agent will hire Vallejo's band, which is pretty good. Guitars, mandolins, and fiddles on the poop, and señoritas in gauzy dresses flitting through graceful dances in the after well! The entertainment ought to appeal to your artistic taste." "I'm going," Jake replied. "So am I," said Dick. Jake grinned.
From the room they went on into a wide, crowded hall, beyond which was another room, enclosed in glass, where there were tables and palms. As they entered, a captain approached. There was a smell of pineapple, the odour of fruit and flowers. From a gallery came the tinkle of mandolins. Mainly the tables were occupied.
It is cool and pleasant after the heat of the day." They walked together to the first house that Mr. Allen had to visit; then Dick strolled on by himself. The place abounded with wine-shops. Through the open doors the sound of the strumming of mandolins, snatches of Spanish song, and occasionally voices raised in dispute or anger, came out. Dick felt no inclination to enter any of them.
The men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but not so handsome as the English, and in figure they were not quite the deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. Their bugles, with the rhythmical note which the tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins of the blind minstrels, made the only street music I remember in Madrid.
There were several good singers among the boys and a number of them had musical instruments, banjos, guitars and mandolins, so that it was an easy matter to get up a concert at any time, the boys whiling away many an hour in this fashion.
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