Page:Impressions of Spain in 1866.djvu/49

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MADRID.
33


than a first visit; for in the latter, one is op- pressed by the feeling of the quantity to be seen and the short time there is to see it in, and so the intense anxiety and fatigue destroy half one's enjoyment of the objects themselves. That evening they were to leave the biting east winds of Madrid for the more genial climate of sunny Malaga; and so, heaving made sundry very necessary purchases, including mantillas and chocolate, and having eaten what turned out to be their last good dinner for a very long time, they started oflf by an eight o'clock train for Cordova, which was to be their halting-place midway. On reaching Alcazar, about one o'clock in the morning, they had to change trains, as the one in which they were branched oflf to Valencia; and for two hours they were kept waiting for the Cordova train. Oh! the misery of those wayside stations in Spain! One long low room filled with smokers and passengers of every class, struggling for chocolate, served in dirty cups by uncivil waiters, with insufficient seats and scant courtesy: no wonder that the Spaniards consider our waiting-rooms real palaces. You have no alternative in the winter season but to endure this foetid, stifiing atmosphere, and be blinded with smoke, or else to fi'ee:5e and shiver outside, where there are no benches at all, and your only