Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 35 CHAPTER III. A BOURGEOIS FAMILY IN THEIR DAILY LIFE. LAD RID. A fine spring morning at seven o'clock. Sunshine everywhere. The narrow pavements are astir with early risers of the poorer class, the cafetines and puestos de cafe with lowly customers sipping their scalding cups of recuelo; the markets " all alive with buyers and with sellers are humming like a hive," and the general atmosphere is agog with the multitudinous noises of a great city just awoken from its rest. A strident army of itinerant hawkers and petty craftsmen goes ceaselessly to and fro. The trapero (half scavenger, half ragpicker, or as London slang would call him, the tot-raker), with his long-drawn note, is followed by the knife-grinder, with his whistle and nasal cry, " afilado-o-o-r"; by the flower- seller with his moke — his the prettiest and most musical cry of all (the flowerseller's, I mean, not the moke's) ; the honeyman, with his " miel de la Alcarria, miel"; and a myriad others. For everything, in Spain, seems saleable in the street ; toothpicks and brushes, combs and pins, jewellery, perfumery, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, cravats and ribbons, caps and walking - sticks,writing - paper and envelopes, pens and pencils, glasses and bottles, crockery and tin-ware. But the hero of my chapter, impervious to the hurly-burly beneath his window, sleeps imperturbably on. This is Don Pablo Vargas de la Mata, a well-to- do, middle-aged merchant of Madrid, who dwells, together with his family, in the Barrio del Hospicio, in a decent street of the same, number seventeen, second floor, left. His family consists of his wife; Dona Eugenia, a stout lady with a commanding voice and matronly carriage, of two charming daughters, Purificacidn and Julia, between the ages of—but I should be rude to tell—and a s...