Poste Restante! Poste Restante! I scan
envelope after envelope. I know the Poste
Restante in New York, with its struggling
striving crowd of German and Irish
emigrants craving for news from the dear ones
at home. In connexion with this department
of the American postal service, I may
mention that in the great Atlantic cities
they have an admirable practice of issuing
periodically, alphabetical lists of persons
for whom letters have arrived by the European
mails "to be left till called for," or
whose addresses cannot be discovered. The
latter cases are very numerous; letters
addressed; "Franz Hermann, New York," or
"My Cousin Biddy in Amerikey," not being
uncommon.

I roam from pillar to post, always
"Restante," and ten years slip away, and I come
upon an envelope inscribed, "Poste
Restante, Madrid." There is another name for
this traveller's convenience in Spanish, but I
have forgotten it. Otherwise "Poste
Restante" belongs to the universal language.
Everybody knows what it means. The
Madrileña Poste Restante is like most other
things of Spain: a marvel and a mystery.
You reach the post-office itself, by a dirty
street called, if I remember aright, the
Calle de las Carretas, one of the thoroughfares
branching from that Castilian Seven
Dials the Puerta del Sol. Stop! I really
must apologise for mentioning the name of
the Puerta del Sol. I am mournfully aware
that for the last nine weeks there has been
going about town, in newspapers, in club
rooms, at dinner tables, a ghastly and
maleficent Bore. This is the Puerta del Sol
Bore. Wither him! When he spares you
the Puerta del Sol auger, he gives you a
of the gimlet of the Calle de Alcalà,
or drives you mad with the ratchet-drill of
the Plaza Mayor. Scorch him! With his
long-winded stories of what he said years
ago, to Zumalacarregui and what
Mendizabal said to him. Choke him! With
his interminable discourses about the
"puchero," and the "tertullia," and the
"Cocridas de novillos."

I don't want to be a bore, but it is not
my fault if the chief post-office in Madrid
be close to tho Puerta del Sol. We must
bow down before incontrovertible facts.
The entrance to the office is in a dingy little
alley lined with those agreeable blackened
stone walls, relieved by dungeon-like barred
windows, common in the cities of northern
Spain. Opposite the post-office door, cower
a few little bookstalls, where, too, you may
buy cheap stationery; and there, too, in a
little hutch, in aspect between a sentry-box
and a cobbler's-stall, used to sit a public
scribe, who, for the consideration of a few
reals, would indite petitions for such suppliants
as deemed that their prayers would be
more readily listened to by authority if they
were couched in words of four syllables and
written in fat round characters with flourishes
or "parafos" to all the terminals. The
scribe also would write love-letters for lovelorn
swains of either sex, whose education
had been neglected.

I don't think I ever knew such a black,
dirty, and decayed staircase as that of the
Madrid post-office—- save, perhaps, that of
the Monte de Piété, Paris. You ascended,
so it seemed, several flights, meeting on the
way male and female phantoms shrouded in
cloaks or in mantillas. The mingled odour
of tobacco smoke, of garlic, and of Spain
—- for Spain has its peculiar though
indescribable odour—- was wonderful. The
odds were rather against you, when you
visited the Poste Restante, that the occasion
might be a feast or a fast day of
moment. In either case the office opened
very late, and closed very early; and the
hour selected for your own application
was usually the wrong one. If the
postal machine were in gear, you pushed
aside a green baize door and entered a long
low apartment, with a vaulted roof of stone.
Stuck against the whitewashed walls, were
huge placards covered with names, more or
less illegible. Knots of soldiers in undress
stood calmly contemplating those lists. I
don't think a tithe of the starers expected
any letters; it was only another way of passing
the time. A group of shovel-hatted
priests would be gravely scanning another
list; a party of black-hooded women would
be gossiping before a third; and everybody
would be smoking.

You wandered into another vaulted room,
and there you found your own series of lists
—- those of the "estrangeros." In the way of
reading those lists, madness lay. The
schedules belonging to several months, hung side
by side. There were names repeated thrice
over, names written in differently coloured
inks, names crossed out, names blotted,
names altered, names jobbed at with a
penknife so as to be indecipherable, by some
contemplative spirit in a sportive mood.
The arrangment of names was alphabetical,
but arbitrary. Sometimes the alphabet
began at A and sometimes at T. The system
of indexing was equally mysterious. I will
suppose your name to be Septimus Terminus
Optimus Penn. To this patronymic and