Page:Masterpieces of American Humor (Little Blue Book 959).djvu/21

Rh The true Carnival survives in its naive purity only in Spain. It has faded in Rome into a romping day of clown's play. In Paris it is little more than a busier season for dreary and professional vice. Elsewhere all over the world the Carnival gaieties are confined to the salon. But in Madrid the whole city, from grandee to cordwainer, goes with childlike earnestness in-to the enjoyment of the hour. The Corso begins in the Prado on the last Sunday before Lent, and lasts four days. From noon to night the great drive is filled with a double line of carriages two miles long, and between them are the landaus of the favored hundreds who have the privilege of driving up and down free from the law of the road. This right is acquired by the payment of ten dollars a day to city charities, and produces some fifteen thousand dollars every Carnival. In these carriages all the society of Madrid may be seen; and on foot, darting in and out among the hoofs of the horses, are the young men of Castile in every conceivable variety of absurd and fantastic disguise. There are, of course, pirates and Indians and Turks, monks, prophets, and kings, but the favorite costumes seem to be the Devil and the Englishman. Sometimes the Yankee is attempted, with indifferent success. He wears a ribbon-wreathed Italian bandit's hat, an emroidered jacket, slashed buckskin trousers, and a wide crimson belta dress you would at once recognize as universal in Boston.

Most of the maskers know, by name, at least, the occupants of the carriages. There is always room for a mask in a coach. They leap