ROMANTIC SPAIN:

A Record of Personal Experiences.

BY

JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA,

AUTHOR OF
"LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,"
"AN IRON-BOUND CITY," ETC.

"Oh, lovely Spain! renowned, romantic land!"
Childe Harold.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

LONDON:
WARD AND DOWNEY,
12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1887.
[All Rights Reserved.]

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

ROMANTIC SPAIN.

CHAPTER I.

A Tidy City—A Sacred Corpse—Remarkable Features of Puerto—A Calesa—Lady Blanche's Castle—A Typical English Engineer—British Enterprise—"Success to the Cadiz Waterworks!"—Visit to a Bodega—Wine and Women—The Coming Man—A Strike.

Puerto de Santa Maria has the name of being the neatest and tidiest city in Spain, and neatness and tidiness are such dear homely virtues, I thought I could not do better than hie me thither to see if the tale were true. With a wrench I tore myself from the soft capital of Andalusia, delightful but demoralizing. I was growing lazier every day I spent there; I felt energy oozing out of every pore of my body; and in the end I began to get afraid that if I stopped much longer I should only be fit to sing the song of the sluggard:—"You have waked me too soon, let me slumber again." Seville is a dangerous place; it is worse than Capua; it would enervate Cromwell's Ironsides. Happily for me the mosquitoes found out my bedroom, and pricked me into activity, or I might not have summoned the courage to leave it for weeks, the more especially as I had a sort of excuse for staying. The Cardinal Archbishop had promised a friend of mine to let him inspect the body of St. Fernando, and my friend had promised to take me with him. Now, this was a great favour. St. Fernando is one of the patrons of Seville; he has been dead a long time, but his corpse refuses to putrefy, like those of ordinary mortals; it is a sacred corpse, and in a beatific state of preservation. Three times a year the remains of the holy man are uncovered, and the faithful are admitted to gaze on his incorruptible features. This was not one of the regular occasions; the Cardinal Archbishop had made an exception in compliment to my friend, who is a rising young diplomat, so that the favour was really a favour. I declined it with thanks—very much obliged, indeed—pressure of business called me elsewhere—the cut-and-dry form of excuse; but I never mentioned a word about the mosquitoes. I told my friend to thank the prelate for his graciousness; the prelate expressed his sorrow that my engagements did not permit me to wait, and begged that I would oblige him by letting the British public know the shameful way he and his priests were treated by the Government They had not drawn a penny of salary for three years. This was a fact; and very discreditable it was to the Government, and a good explanation of the disloyalty of their reverences. If a contract is made it should be kept; the State contracted to support the Church, but since Queen Isabella decamped the State had forgotten its engagement.

Puerto de Santa Maria deserves the name it has got. It is a clean and shapely collection of houses, regularly built. People in England are apt to associate the idea of filth with Spain; this, at least in Andalusia, is a mistake. The cleanliness is Flemish. Soap and the scrubbing-brush are not spared; linen is plentiful and spotless, and water is used for other purposes than correcting the strength of wine. Walking down the long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. I am speaking now of fine days; but there are days when the sky is cloudy and the wind blows, and the waters in the Bay of Cadiz below surge up sullen and yeasty, and there are days when the rain comes down quick, thick, and heavy as from a waterspout, and the streets are turned for the moment into rivulets. But the effects of the rain do not last long; Spain is what washerwomen would call a good drying country. Beyond its neatness and tidiness, Puerto has other features to recommend it to the traveller. It has a bookseller's shop, where the works of Eugène Sue and Paul de Kock can be had in choice Spanish, side by side with the Carlist Almanack, "by eminent monarchical writers," and the calendar of the Saragossan prophet (the Spanish Old Moore); but it is not to that I refer—half a hundred Andalusian towns can boast the same. It has its demolished convent, but since the revolution of '68 that is no more a novelty than the Alameda, or sand-strewn, poplar-planted promenade, which one meets in every Spanish hamlet. It has the Atlantic waves rolling in at its feet, and a pretty sight it is to mark the feluccas, with single mast crossed by single yard, like an unstrung bow, moored by the wharf or with outspread sail bellying before the breeze on their way to Cadiz beyond, where she sits throned on the other side of the bay, "like a silver cup" glistening in the sunshine, when sunshine there is. The silver cup to which the Gaditanos are fond of comparing their city looked more like dirty pewter as I approached it by water from Puerto; but I was in a tub of a steamer, there was a heavy sea on and a heavy mist out, and perhaps I was qualmish. Not for its booksellers' shops, for its demolished convent, or for its vulgar Atlantic did this Puerto, which the guide-books pass curtly by as "uninteresting," impress me as interesting, but for two features that no seasoned traveller could, would, or should overlook; its female population is the most attractive in Andalusia, and it is the seat of an agreeable English colony. I happened on the latter in a manner that is curious, so curious as to merit relation.

I had intended to proceed to Cadiz from Seville after I had taken a peep at Puerto, but that little American gentleman whom I met at Córdoba was with me, and persuaded me to stop by the story of a wonderful castle prison, a sort of Tour de Nesle, which was to be seen in the vicinity, where the bonne amie of a King of Spain had been built up in the good old times when monarchs raised favourites from the gutter one day, and sometimes ordered their weazands to be slit the next. This show-place is about a league from Puerto, in the valley of Sidonia, and is called El Castillo de Doña Blanca. We took a calesa to go there. My companion objected to travelling on horseback; he could not stomach the peculiar Moorish saddle with its high-peaked cantle and crupper, and its catch-and-carry stirrups. We took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern of those employed to beautify genteel coffins, remove the cushions, and replace them with a wisp of straw, smash the springs, and put swing-leathers underneath instead, cover the whole article with a coating of liquid mud, leave it to dry in a mouldy place where the rats shall have free access to the leather for gnawing practice, return in seven years, and you will find a tolerably correct imitation of that decayed machine, the Andalusian calesa. It is more picturesque than the Neapolitan corricolo; it is all ribs and bones, and is much given to inward groaning as it jerks and jolts along. Such a trap we took; the driver lazily clambered on the shafts, and away hobbled our lean steed.

The road to Lady Blanche's Castle is like that to Jordan in the nigger songs; it is "a hard road to travel"—a road full of holes and quagmires and jutting rocks; and yet the driver told me it had once been a good road, but that was in the reign of Queen Isabella. Everything seems to have been allowed to go to dilapidation since. On the outskirts of Puerto we passed an English cemetery; I am glad to say it is almost uninhabited. If there is an English dead settlement there ought to be a live one, I reasoned, unless those who are buried here date from Peninsular battles. The first part of the road to Blanche's Castle is level, and bordered with thick growths of prickly pear; there is a view of the sea, and of the Guadalate, spanned by a metal bridge—a Menai on a small scale. Farther on, as we get to a district called La Piedad, the country is diversified by swampy flats at one side and sandy hills at the other. Blanche's Castle was a commonplace ruin, a complete "sell," and we turned our horse's head rather savagely. As we were coming back, the little American shortening the way by Sandford and Merton observations of this nature—"Prickly pear makes a capital hedge; no cattle will face it; the spikes of the plant are as tenacious as fish-hooks. The fibres of the aloe are unusually strong; they make better cordage than hemp, but will not bear the wet so well"—a sight caught my eyes which caused me to stare. A tall young fellow, with his trousers tucked up, was wading knee-deep in the bottoms beside the road. He wore a suit of Oxford mixture.

"Who or what is that gentleman?" I asked the driver.

"An English engineer," was the answer.

I stopped the calesa, hailed him, and inquired was he fond of rheumatic fever. He laughed, and pronounced the single word, "Duty." A little word, but one that means much. A Spanish engineer would never have done this; they are great in offices and at draughting on paper, but they seldom tuck up their sleeves, much less their trousers, to labour out of doors as the young Englishman was doing. I made his acquaintance, and he willingly consented to show me over the works in which he was engaged, which were intended to supply Cadiz with water. In England water is to be had too easily to be estimated at its proper value. At Cadiz it is a marketable commodity. Even the parrots there squeak "agua." Every drop of rain that falls is carefully gathered in cisterns, and the conveyance of water in boatloads from Puerto across the Bay is a regular trade. An English company had been formed to supply the parched seaport and the ships that call there with fresh water, and its reservoirs were situated at La Piedad. In the bowels of the flats below, where the snipe-shooting ought to be good, our countryman told me the water was to be sought. Galleries had been sunk in every direction in land which the company had purchased, and pumps and engines are soon to be erected that will raise the liquid collected there up to the reservoirs which have been hewn out of the hills above. These reservoirs, approached by passages excavated out of the rough sandstone, are stout and solid specimens of the mason's craft directed by the engineer's skill. Here we met a second gentleman superintending the labours of the men, but he was surely a Spaniard; he spoke the language with the readiness of one born on the soil; still, he had a matter-of-fact, resolute quickness about him that was hardly Spanish. Doubts as to his nationality were soon dispelled; the engineer we had surprised in the swamp presented us to his colleague Forrest, engineer to Messrs. Barnett and Gale, of Westminster, the contractors, as thoroughbred an Englishman as ever came out of the busy town of Blackburn.

Mr. Forrest at once stood to cross-examination by the American, who had all the inquisitiveness of his race.

"We employ a couple of hundred men, on an average, here," he said, "all of whom, with but two exceptions, are Spaniards, and very fair hard-working fellows they are; in the town below we have a small colony of English, and if you don't take it amiss I shall be happy to present you to our society."

I know little of the technicalities of engineering, but I saw enough of this work to be certain that it was well and truly done, and I heard enough of the scarcity of water in Cadiz to be convinced it will be a great boon when finished. The reservoirs are constructed in colonnades, supported by ashlar pillars and roofed with rubble; for the water must be shaded from the sun in this hot climate; the pillars are buttered over with cement, and there is over a foot of cement concrete on the flooring, to guard against filtration. As we paced about the sombre aisles, echo multiplied every syllable we uttered; the repetition of sound is as distinct as in the whispering gallery of St. Paul's, and I could not help remarking, "What a splendid robber's cave this would make!"

"Too tell-tale," said the practical American; "make a better cave of harmony."

"The only pipes that are ever likely to blow here are water-pipes," smilingly put in the engineer; "we intend to lay them from this to Cadiz, some twenty-eight miles distant. Roughly speaking, we are about ninety feet above the level of the place, so that the highest building there can be supplied with ease."

The Romans were benefactors to many portions of this dry land of Spain; they built up aqueducts which are still in use, but they neglected Cadiz. The town has been dependent on these springs of La Piedad for its water supply, except such as dropped from heaven, for three hundred years, and attempts to obtain water from wells or borings in the neighbourhood have invariably failed. The water which is found in this basin, held by capillary attraction in the permeable strata through which it soaks till the hard impermeable stratum is met—retained, in short, in a natural reservoir—is excellent in quality, limpid and sparkling. Puerto has been supplied from the place for time out of mind, and Puerto has been so well supplied that it could afford to sell panting Cadiz its surplus. With English capital and enterprise putting new life into those old hills, and cajoling the precious beverage out of their bosom, which unskilled engineers let go to waste, Cadiz should shortly have reason to bless the foreign company that relieves its thirst. Clear virgin water, such as will course down the tunnels to bubble up in the Gaditanian fountains, is the greatest luxury of life here; "Agua fresca, cool as snow," is the most welcome of cries in the summer, and temperate Spain is as devoted to the colourless liquid that the temperance lecturer Gough and his compeers call Adam's ale, as ever London drayman was to Barclay's Entire. Success, then, to the Cadiz Waterworks Company: we drank the toast on the hill-side of "Piety" they were making fruitful of good, drank it in tipple of their and nature's brewing, but had latent hopes that Forrest or his colleague would help us to a bumper of the generous grape-juice for which the district is famed, when we got down to the pleasant companionship of the English colony below.

Nor were our hopes disappointed. There are innumerable bodegas, or wine-vaults, in the town, in which bottles and barrels of wine are neatly caged in labelled array, according to age, quality, and kind. Very clean and roomy these stores of vinous treasure are, with an indescribable semi-medicinal odour languidly pervading them. We visited a bodega belonging to an Englishman, who ranks as a grandee of the first-class, the Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo and eke of Vitoria, but who is better known as the Duke of Wellington. The natural wine of this district is too thin for insular palates. They crave something fiery, and, by my word, they get it. Like that Irish car-driver who rejected my choicest, oily, mellow "John Jameson," but thanked me after gulping a hell-glass of new spirit, violent assault liquefied, they want a drink that will catch them by the throat and assert its prerogative going down. What a beamy old imposition is that rich brown sherry of city banquets, over which the idiot of a connoisseur cunningly smacks his lips and rolls his moist eyes. If he were only told how much of it was real and how much artificial, would he not gasp and crimson! It would be unmerciful to inform him that his pet cordial is charged with sulphuric acid gas, that it is sweetened with cane-sugar, that it is flavoured with "garnacha dulce," that it is coloured with plastered must and fortified with brandy, before it is shipped. Let us leave him in blissful ignorance. We tasted many samples before we left, but I own I have no liking for sherries, simple or doctored. Among Spanish wines I far prefer the full-bodied astringent sub-acidity of the common Val de Peñas, beloved of Cervantes. But the Queen of wines is sound Bordeaux. To that Queen, however, a delicate etherous Amontillado might be admitted as Spanish maid-of-honour, preceding the royal footsteps, while the syrupy Malaga from the Doradillo grape might follow as attendant in her train.

From wine to women is an easy transition. Both are benedictions from on high, and I have no patience with the foul churl who cannot enjoy the one with proper continence, and rise the better and more chivalrous from the society of the other. Wine well used is a good familiar creature—kindles, soothes, and inspirits: the cup of wine warmed by the smile of woman gives courage to the soldier and genius to the minstrel. With Burns—and he was no ordinary seer—I hold that the sweetest hours that e'er we spend are spent among the lasses. I will go farther and say the most profitable hours. And some sweet and profitable hours 'twas mine to spend among the fawn-orbed lasses of Puerto, with their childlike gaiety, their desire to please, and their fetching freedom from affectation. Would that the wines exported from the district were half as unsophisticated! These lasses were not learned in the "ologies" or the "isms," but they were sincere; and their locks flowed long and free, and when they laughed the coral sluices flying open gave scope to a full silvery music cascading between pales of gleaming pearl. An admixture of this strain with the fair-skinned men of the North should produce a magnificent race; and, indeed, if we paid half the attention to the improvement of the human animal which we do to that of the equine or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming man, the highest form of well-balanced qualities—moral, intellectual, and masculine—the nearest approach to perfection, must ultimately be developed in the United States.

Puerto has a wide-spread reputation as the nursery-ground for bull-fighters. To the arena it is what Newmarket is to the British turf. Everybody there walks about armed, but murder is not more rife in proportion than in London. As it happened, a fellow was shot while I was there, but that would not justify one in coming to the conclusion that homicide was a flourishing indigenous product. Still, the natives did not escape the contagion of unrest of their countrymen. For example, the last news I heard before leaving my English friends was that the men in the vineyards had struck work. These lazy scoundrels had the impudence to demand that they should have half an hour after arrival on the ground, and before beginning work, to smoke cigarettes, the same grace after the breakfast hour, two hours for a siesta in the middle of the day, another interval for a bout of smoking in the afternoon, and finally that each should be entitled to an arroba (more than three and a half gallons English) of wine per acre at the end of the season. They go on the same basis as some trades' unions we are acquainted with—reduction of hours of labour and increase of wages. "Will you give in to them?" I asked of an English settler, in the wine trade. "Give in———" but it is unnecessary to repeat the expletive; "I'll quietly shut up my bodega."

CHAPTER II.

The Charms of Cadiz—Seville-by-the-Sea—Cervantes-Daughters of Eve—The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't—Fasting Monks—Notice to Quit on the Nuns—The Rival Processions—Gutting a Church—A Disorganized Garrison—Taking it Easy—The Mysterious "Mr. Crabapple"—The Steamer Murillo—An Unsentimental Navvy—Bandaged Justice—Tricky Ship-Owning—Painting Black White.

The man who pitched on Cadiz as the site of a city knew what he was about. Without exception it is the most charmingly-located place I ever set foot in. Its white terraces, crowded with white pinnacles, belvederes, and turrets, glistening ninety-nine days out of the hundred in clear sunlight, rise gently out of a green sea necked with foam; the harbour is busy with commerce, crowded with steamers and sailing ships coming and going from the Mediterranean shores, from France, from England, or from the distant countries beyond the Atlantic; the waters around (for Cadiz is built on a peninsula, and peeps of water make the horizon of almost every street) are dotted with fishing craft or scudding curlews; the public squares are everlastingly verdant with the tall fern-palm, the feathery mimosa, the myrtle, and the silvery ash, which only recalls the summer the better for its suggestive appearance of having been recently blown over with dust; the gaze inland is repaid with the sight of hills brown by distance, of sheets of pasture, and pyramidal salt-mounds of creamy grey; and the gaze upwards—to lend a glow to the ravishing picture—is delighted by such a cope of dreamy blue, deep and pure, and unstained by a single cloudlet, as one seldom has the happiness of looking upon in England outside the doors of an exhibition of paintings. The climate is dry and genial, and not so hot as Seville. The Sevillanos know that, and come to Cadiz when the heats make residence in their own city insupportable. Winter is unknown; skating has never been witnessed by Gaditanos, except when exhibited by foreign professors, clad in furs, who glide on rollers over polished floors; and small British boys who are fond of snowballing when they come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in sapphires and emeralds, but adds—lest we should all be running to hug the jewel—there is little art here and less society.

"Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is one of those wiseacres who are in a community, but not of it, who materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated, for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus:

"Salve! Sancho with the paunch,
Thou most famous squire,
Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee
Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee.
Fortune gave wit and common-sense,
Philosophy, ambition to aspire;
While Chivalry thy wallet stored,
And led thee harmless through the fire."

With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr. Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings, "woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Royal crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion; kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands, though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and wholesome for women and children. But les femmes du peuple, the fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers, and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but their ideal of a Republic is not that of Señores Castelar and Figueras. They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown, Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic:

"My children, be chaste—till you're tempted;
While sober, be wise and discreet,
And humble your bodies with—fasting,
Whene'er you have nothing to eat."

So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain, but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies with fasting since. For those amongst them who were old or infirm that was a grievance; but for the lusty young fellows who could handle a spade there need not be much pity, for Spain had more of their sort than was good for her. Even at that date the revolutionists of Cadiz had some respect left for the nunneries. But they progressed; the example of Paris was not lost upon them. The ayuntamiento which came into power with the Republic was Federal. Barcelona and Malaga were stirring; the ayuntamiento made up its mind that Cadiz should be as good as its neighbours and show vigour too. The cheapest way to show vigour was to make war on the weak and defenceless, and that was what this enlightened and courageous municipality did. The nuns in the convent of the Candelaria were told that their house and the church adjoining were in a bad state, that they must clear out, and that both should be razed in the interests of public safety. It was not that the presence of ladies devoted to God after their own wishes and the traditions of their creed was offensive to the Republic; no, not by any means. The nuns protested that if their convent and church were in a dangerous condition the proper measure to take was to prop them up, not pull them down. But the blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again. The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to the Town-house to beg of their worships, the civic tyrants, to revoke their order. If the convent and church were in ruins, the ladies were prepared to pay out of their own pockets the expense of all repairs. That procession was a sight to see; there was the beauty, the rank, the fashion, and the worth of the city, in "linked sweetness long drawn out," coiling through the thoroughfares on pious errand. The fair petitioners were dressed as for a fete; diamonds sparkled in their hair, and the potent fan, never deserted by the Andalusians, was agitated by five hundred of the smallest of hands in the softest of gloves. But the civic tyrants were more severe than Coriolanus. They were not to be mollified by woman's entreaties, but rightly fearing her charms they fled. When the procession arrived at the Town-house, there was but a solitary intrepid bailie to receive it. They told him their tale. He paid them the usual compliments, kissed their feet in the grand Oriental way individually and collectively, said he would lay their wishes before his colleagues, but that he could give no promise to recall the mandate of the municipality—it was more than he dare undertake to do, and so forth. The long and short of it was, he politely sent them about their business. They came away, working the fans more pettishly than ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered ladies of their right to then property. Here the first act of the drama ended.

The second was, if anything, more sensational, though infinitely less attractive. The Federals bit their thumbs, and cried:

"Ah, this is the work of the priests!"

So it was; not a doubt of that. The Federals meditated, and this was the fruit of their meditations:

"Let us organize a counter-procession!"

That counter-procession was a sight to see, too; the feature of elegance was conspicuous by its absence, but there was more colour in it. Harridans of seventy crawled after hussies of seventeen; bare arms and bandannas were more noticeable than black veils and fans; the improbæ Gaditanæ, known of old to certain lively satirists, Martial and Juvenal by name, turned out in force. Mayhap it is prejudice, but Republican females, methinks, are rather muscular than good-looking. Still they have influence sometimes, and when they said their say at the Town-house the ladies plainly betrayed how much they dreaded that influence. They wrote to Madrid praying that the municipality should be arrested in its course. Señor Castelar did send a remonstrance; some say he ordered the local authorities not to touch the church or convent, but they laughed at his letter, and contented themselves by reflecting that he was not in possession of the facts—that is, if they reflected at all, which is doubtful.

Act the third was in representation during my stay. I passed the Candelaria one morning. Scaffolding poles were erected in the street alongside in preparation for the demolition of the building, and a party of workmen in the pay of the municipality were engaged gutting the church of its contents, and carting them off to a place of deposit, where they were to be sold by public auction. These workmen looked cheerful over their sacrilege. A waggon was outside the door laden with ornaments ripped from the walls, gilt picture-frames, fragments of altar-rails, and the head of a cherub. Half a dozen rough fellows in guernseys had their shoulders under a block of painted wood-carving. As far as I could make out, it was the effigy of one of the Evangelists. I was refused admittance to the building, but I was told the sacramental plate had been removed with the same indifference. The nuns escaped without insult, thanks to the good offices of some friends outside, who brought up carriages at midnight to the doors of the convent and conveyed them to secret places of safety put at their disposal by the bishop.

The people who committed this mean piece of desecration were all Federal Republicans. They disobeyed orders from Madrid, and would disobey them again. They were as deaf to the commands of Señor Castelar as to the prayers and entreaties of the wives and daughters of respectable fellow-citizens. And all this time that the central authority were defied, artillerymen and linesmen were loitering about the streets of Cadiz. Eventually it was plain they would be disarmed, as they were disarmed at Malaga; and they would not offer serious opposition to the process. Their officers were barely tolerated by them. The Guardia Civil were true to duty, but when the crisis came, what could they do any more than their comrades at Malaga? They were but as a drop of water in a well. Disarmament is not liked by the old soldiers who have money to their credit, but there is a large proportion of mere conscripts in the ranks, and they are glad to jump at the chance of returning home.

Troubles worse than any may yet be in store; meanwhile the sun shines, and Cadiz, like Seville, takes it easy. But there is a bad spirit abroad, and it is growing. A pack of ruffians forcibly entered a mansion at San Lucar, and annexed what was in it in the name of Republican freedom; the "volunteers of liberty" have taken the liberty of breaking into the houses of the consuls at Malaga in search for arms; an excited mob attacked the printing-office of El Oriente at Seville after I left, smashed the type, and threatened to strangle the editor if he brought out the paper again; and the precious municipality of Cadiz has nothing better to do than order that no mourners shall be allowed in future to use religious exercises or emblems, to sing litanies or carry crosses, at the open graves of relatives in the cemeteries.

In the merchants' club (of which I was made free) they were saddened at the disrupted state of society, but took it as kismet, and seemed to think that all would come right in the end, by the interposition of some Deus ex machinâ. But who that God was they could not tell: he was hidden in the womb of Fate. As Cadiz accepted its destiny with equanimity, I accommodated myself to the situation, and did as the natives did. I helped to fly kites from the flat housetops—a favourite pastime of mature manhood here; I opened mild flirtations with the damsels in cigar-shops, and discovered that they were not slow to meet advances; I expended hours every day cheapening a treatise on the mystery of bull-fighting, with accompanying engravings, in vain—its price was above rubies. But my great distraction was a strange character I met at dinner at the house of the British Consul. I did not catch his name at our introduction, so I mentally named him Mr. Crabapple. He was short and stout, had a round wizened face freckled to the fuscous tint of a russedon apple, and was endowed with a voice which had all the husky sonority of a greengrocer's. He was beardless and sandy-haired, and one of those persons whose age is a puzzle to define; he might have been anything between fifteen and five-and-thirty. As he talked of Harrow as if he had left it but yesterday, I was disposed to set him down as a queer public-school boy on vacation, until I was astounded by some self-possessed remark on Jamaica dyewoods. We stopped in the same hotel. One morning he descended the stairs, a sort of dressing-case in hand, and yelled to an urchin at the door:

"Here, you son of a sea-calf, take this down to the waterside for me!"

"Will he understand you?" I said.

"Bound to," Mr. Crabapple replied; "never talk to them any other way, anyhow. 'Tis their business to understand. Ta, ta—deuce of a hurry."

"Where are you going, may I ask?"

"Read the Church Service—rather a bore—Sunday, you know."

The nondescript, then, was a chaplain.

The same evening he returned to the hotel, and on the following morning I saw him again descending the stairs, the same dressing-case in hand. He nodded salute, slung his luggage to the same urchin with the cry, "Hook it, you lubber!" and, turning to me, said, "Ta, ta, sheering off again."

"Where to now?"

"Mediterranean."

"There's no boat to-day."

"There is, though—there's mine;" and he was off.

The supposed chaplain was a stray-away from a novel by Marryat, commanded her Majesty's gunboat Catapult, and was at Cadiz on the duty of protecting British interests. At the moment his mission was to carry important despatches to Gibraltar.

My mission to Cadiz was, partly, to ascertain the progress of the inquiry into the case of the Murillo steamer, more than suspected of having run down the Northfleet, a vessel laden with railway-iron and navvies, off Dungeness, on the night of the 22nd of January previous. Three hundred lives had been lost on the occasion. I knew something of that wreck, for I had seen and spoken with the survivors in the Sailors' Home at Dover on the following evening. A dazed, stupid lot they were, of an exceedingly low standard of intelligence. The sense of their own rescue had overcome the poignancy of grief. I envied them their stolidity, which I explained to my own mind by the rush of the engulfing waters still swirling and singing knell of sudden doom in their ears.

"Guv'nor," said one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and I chewed a bit o' baccer."

I saw the Murillo lying quietly a little distance off the land—a handsome, shapely craft, fine in the lines, with a sharp stem fashioned like that of a ram. She was painted black, with the exception of a band of pink above the water-line, where she was coated with Peacock's mixture. The British Consul informed me that he understood the inquiry into the guilt of the master was to be carried on secretly. He would not be allowed to attend it. Copies of the depositions of the accused, and permission to see them, had also been denied to the agents of the British Government, who applied for them for the purposes of the Board of Trade inquiry. Though Spaniards, in private conversation, own that the Murillo is the criminal ship, they seem, for some unaccountable reason, to be anxious that she should escape the penalty of her wickedness, as if the national honour were concerned, and the national honour would be served by cloaking an offence cruel and mean in itself, and awful in its consequences.

There is a sentence in the Comminations which would keep running in my mind every time I thought of that emigrant ship sent to the bottom off Dungeness—"Cursed is he who smiteth his enemy secretly." But if he who smites his enemy secretly is accursed, what is he who smites his neighbour and then flees away like a coward in the dark? Is he not twice and thrice wicked, and to be branded with malediction deeper still? Such a thing the Murillo steamer did—there could be no manner of doubt about it; every seafaring man and every Spaniard admits her blood-guiltiness; yet there she lies off Puntales, near the Trocadero, calmly expecting soon to be under weigh again with her criminal master and crew on board, with no punishment registered against her or them. The Consul-General of Spain in London wrote to the papers after the loss of the Northfleet, saying if this man was the wrongdoer he would be punished, and sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. But he is the wrongdoer, and he will never be sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. The master of the Murillo and the sailors of the watch on the fatal night are in prison, but they will never be brought to serious account. The figure of Justice in these latitudes is true to the sculptor's ideal in one sense: the eyes are bandaged, not that Justice shall be impartial, but that she may not see.

This instance of the Murillo is but one of many, and as it illustrates an artifice of tricky ship-owning, it will be well to state why the Murillo will go scot-free, and may audaciously turn up again in British waters disguised by a few coats of paint, exhibiting a fresh figure-head, and bearing a new name in gilt lettering on her stern.

In the first place, the Murillo belonged not to Spanish so much as English owners. The line of steamers of which she was one was the property of a company of shareholders. The company was anxious that their vessels should fly the Spanish flag, so they made one Don Miguel Styles the nominal head of the firm. This individual was a mere clerk in their office, a man of straw, and at the date of the catastrophe Don Miguel Styles had no more substantial existence than our old friend John Styles: he was dead, and in his grave.

Nextly, Mr. Daniel Macpherson, one of the most eminent merchants in the port of Cadiz and Lloyd's agent, had been served with an instrument claiming damages to the amount of 50,000 pesetas (£2,000), because that he had calumniated the good ship Murillo, and caused her prejudice and injury by detaining her a couple of months in the waters of Cadiz. The persons who instituted this action forget that the Spanish courts have no jurisdiction in the matter of libels published in England. And as for the prejudice caused to the vessel, it is incredible that the British Government should be so weak as to wait for letters from Lloyd's agent before opening an inquiry into the deaths of some three hundred of its subjects and the identity of the dastardly scoundrel who was the cause of their deaths, who disabled the ship that held them, and then slunk off, leaving them to the mercy of the midnight sea. That the Murillo was that vessel, even those who maintain that she cannot be proved legally guilty do not attempt to deny. It is true, as they say, that moral certainty is one thing, legal certainty another. But there was seldom a clearer chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to the perpetrator of any crime than that which convicted the Murillo of being the misdemeanant. She was off Dungeness at the hour of the disaster, and she was in contact with a ship; this the imprisoned master admitted in his log. But he alleged that the ship could not have been the Northfleet. He said he came into collision with a vessel; that he stood by her for half an hour; that one of her boats put off with some persons on board carrying a lantern; that they went round her examining whether there was anything wrong; and that no call having been made to him for assistance he steamed away. But there was a discrepancy between the entry in his log and that in the log of the engineer. The latter, an Englishman, stated that the engines of the Murillo were backed before the collision, that she went astern afterwards, and then went on ahead. The delay altogether was only for a few minutes. No mention of the half-hour. The engineer had no object in telling a lie. The master of the Murillo had. No other ship was in collision off Dungeness that night. Besides, what meant the order to the Murillo to come on at once to Cadiz if she had been in collision, and not stop at Lisbon, whither she was bound as port of call, if not to get her into limits where justice is notoriously blind and halt? Argument is unnecessary and childish; it was the Murillo which cut down the Northfleet. But Spain will never exact retribution for the destruction of the property and the sacrifice of the lives of aliens. Cosas de España.

CHAPTER III.

Expansion of Carlism—A Pseudo-Democracy—Historic Land and Water Marks—An Impudent Stowaway—Spanish Respect for Providence—A Fatal Signal—Playing with Fire—Across the Bay—Farewell to Andalusia—British Spain.

Towards the close of February, a grave official report was published in the Gaceta of Madrid, announcing that an engagement had been fought with the Carlists and a victory scored, one of the enemy having been killed. We were now in April, some six weeks later, and Carlism still showed lively signs of existence, notwithstanding the death of that solitary combatant. The statement of the troops employed against it will be the best measure of its importance. These consisted of a battalion and two companies of Engineers, four companies of Foot Artillery, a battery of Horse and five batteries of Mountain Artillery; eight squadrons of Cuirassiers, seven of Lancers, four of Hussars, a section of Mounted Chasseurs (Tiradores), and eighteen battalions of Infantry of the line, with five of Cazadores, or light infantry. Behind this force of regulars were the Francos or Free-shooters of Navarre (who were about as good as their prototypes, the francs-tireurs of France—no better), some mobilized Volunteers, and the Carabineros, or revenue police. There were some who imagined that the hosts of Don Carlos might crown the hills of Vallecas, and present themselves before the gate of Atocha to the consternation of Madrid, as did those of his predecessor in the September of 1837. But the Federals of the south did not mind. What did not touch them, they cared not a jot for. They were of the pseudo-democracy which wants to live without working, consume without producing, obtain posts without being trained for them, and arrive at honours without desert—the selfish and purblind pseudo-democracy of incapacity and cheek.

As I had no pecuniary interest in salt, wine, phosphate of soda, hides, or cork—the chief exports of Cadiz—I left the much-bombarded port on the Vinuesa, one of the boats of the Alcoy line plying to Malaga. My immediate destination was the Hock, but we went no nearer than Algeciras, the town on the opposite side of the bay, off which Saumarez gave such a stern account of the Spanish and French combined on the 12th of July, 1801. The sea was without a ripple. The bright coasts of two Continents were in view. On such a day as this the first adventurers must have crossed from Africa to Europe. Hero might almost have swum across. Even Mr. Brownsmith of Eastchepe might rig a craft out of an empty sugar hogshead, set up his walking-stick for mast, tie his pocket-handkerchief to it for sail, and trust to the waves in safety—that is, if Mr. Brownsmith of Eastchepe had in him the heart of Raleigh, not of Bumble. Some men are born to be drivers of tram-cars, some to be captains of corsairs. The pioneer of navigation must have been cut out by nature to be a High-Admiral of bold buccaneers.

We were only five passengers on the steamer, and we amused ourselves comparing notes. One told of a voyage from Barcelona to Alicante which he had once undertaken. The first night out they lost a sailor; he was seized with a fit and died; and then came the poser. When they would arrive at Alicante and muster the crew for the inspection of the health officers one would be wanting; suspicions would be aroused that he had fallen a victim to contagious disease, and they ran the hazard of being stuck into quarantine unless they could succeed in buying themselves off with an exorbitant bribe. While they were in a quandary, a white head popped above a gangway forward and a voice sang out:

"I'll get you out of the hole for a consideration."

"Who the deuce are you? Where did you spring from?" cried the skipper.

"A stowaway,—a flour-barrel. I'll parade as the dead man's substitute for ten dollars and a square meal."

In the end they were glad to accept the impudent proposal; the corpse was flung overboard, and the stowaway entered the port of Alicante an honest British tar, looking the whole world in the face like Longfellow's village blacksmith, and jingling ten dollars in his pocket.

We passed by Barrosa, where Graham gave the French such a thrashing in 1811, and the 87th Irish Fusiliers earned their glorious surname of the "Eagle-takers;" and over the waves of Trafalgar where Nelson did his duty, and was smitten with a bullet in the spine; and passing into the Straits and rounding the point by Tarifa, stood in for the Bay of Gibraltar. A spacious swelling spread of live water it is, and safe, except, as one of my fellow-passengers informed me, for a rock off the Punta del Carnero, or Mutton Point. The rock is covered when the tide is high (for there is a tide here), but rears its tortoise-like back over the surface for some hours at the ebb. The Channel squadron was coming out of Gib some years before when an ironclad grounded on this rock, but was got off without more damage than a scraping. As the danger to the navigation was outside the limits of the fortress, the British authorities applied to the Spanish for permission to clear away the obstruction. It was easily to be accomplished. A party of sappers could set a caisson round it, bore a gallery, insert a charge, and blast the rock into smithereens with safety and despatch. But the Spaniards would not consent to such an interference with the designs of Providence; the poor fishermen on the coast were often dependent for their livelihood on what they could pick up from wrecks, and if this rock were removed Nature would be sacrilegiously altered, and the interesting wreckers deprived of many an honest coin. I tell the tale as it was told to me. I wonder should it be dedicated to the amphibious corps.

Another story bearing on the successful revolution inaugurated by Prim is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is the same; the scene and the dramatis personæ are merely shifted. One of the stereotyped military risings was to be initiated at Algeciras on the arrival of Prim from England. The intimation that he was at hand was to be made by the firing of two rockets from the ship which carried him. On a certain night at the close of August, 1868, two rockets blazed in the sky, and were noticed by the impatient conspirators at Algeciras, who flew to arms to cries of "Down with the Queen," and "Live Prim and Liberty." But no Prim landed. The alarm was premature, the rising a flash in the pan. What they had taken for the bright herald of the advent of "El Paladino" was the signal of a Peninsular and Oriental steamer which had arrived on her passage to Port Said. For the sake of appearances, a number of unfortunate fools were set up against a wall and had their brains blown out in tribute to law and order. But the fruit was ripening. Within little more than a fortnight came the insurrection of the fleet at Cadiz, upon the appearance in that port of the popular hero, and before the end of the month Queen Isabella had fled over the French frontier, never to return to Spain as a sovereign. Prim's plot was attended with a fortune in excess of his most sanguine hopes; he entered Madrid in triumph in October, and was created a Marshal in November. All was joy and enthusiasm, but the hapless tools of ambition who had helped to prepare the way for him below in Algeciras were not of the jubilee.

At first sight the rock looms up large like a frowning inhospitable islet, the stretch of the Neutral Ground being so low that one cannot detect it above the sea-level until almost right upon it. We left the Vinuesa and entered a boat with a couple of sturdy rowers, who offered to pull us across the Bay for five dollars. As I dipped a hand in the brine one of them raised a cry of "Take care!" there were "mala pesca" there. Mr. Shark, who is an ugly customer, had been cruising in the neighbourhood, and had taken a morsel out of an American swimmer a little time before. There were three masts protruding over the water at one spot, the relics of some gallant ship, and index to one of those godsends which the Spanish Government is solicitous to guarantee to the distressed and deserving local fishermen. What a pity it was not the Murillo! That would have been poetic retribution.

No matter: with all thy faults I like thee, Spain, and especially that brown dusty province of Andalusia, with its oranges and pomegranates; its dancing fountains splashed with sunshine; its winsome damozels with such lisping languors of voice; its philosophic waiters upon the morrow, happy in a cigarette, a melon and a guitar; its muleteers crooning snatches of lazy song; its peasants with hair tied in beribboned pigtail; its tawny boys in Manola colours; aye, and its artistic beggars.

"Ah! now you see the Neutral Ground; that village to the left is Lineas, where you can get a glass of Manzanilla cheap," exclaimed a companion.

I do not set exceeding store by your pale thin Manzanilla, nor do I care to load my mouth with the flavour of a drug store.

"There are the sheds we put up the time Prim was expected; they are on the Neutral Ground, ha, ha! where the soil is supposed to be inviolate; but we have forgotten to take them down since. We were too many for them."

And now we are by the landing-stairs, and the Customs' officer demands our passport in English. We answer him cheerily that we need none, and to his smiling welcome we step on the soil of British Spain; but it would be unpardonable to begin describing it at the tail of a chapter.

CHAPTER IV.

Gabriel Tar—A Hard Nut to Crack—In the Cemetery—An Old Tipperary Soldier—Marks of the Broad Arrow—The "Scorpions"—The Jaunting-Cars—Amusements on the Bock—Mrs. Damages' Complaint—The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa—How to Learn Spanish—Types of the British Officer—The Wily Ben Solomon—A Word for the Subaltern—Sunset Gun—The Sameness of Sutlersville.

Where I went to school, we had a droll lad, whose humour developed itself in mispronunciation. In my nonage I considered that unique. Now I know it is a rather common order of quaintness. Hugh used to call Sierra Leone, "Sarah Alone;" Cambodia, "Gamboge;" Stromboli, "Storm-boiler;" and Gibraltar, "Gabriel Tar." How we used to wrinkle with laughter at his sallies, launched with an artistically unconscious air, until the swooping cane came swishing down on our backs! And here I was in Gabriel Tar. I vow the first inclination I felt was to write to Hugh with the date engraved on the note-paper, and indeed so I should have done, but that I had not seen him for nigh twenty years, and when last I heard of him he was married, and had learned to be serious and to speak with precision. The fun had been driven out of him by responsibility. Propriety had come with prosperity.

Call it by what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is welcome to take it—when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who is too surly to barter his trust for gold. So Gabriel Tar will remain intact, until the porter grows feeble or falls asleep.

British Spain, or "the Rock," or Gib, as it is indifferently termed, or Sutlersville, as I prefer to name it, can be converted into an island at the will of its defenders. The sandy spit of Neutral Ground at one side of which Tommy Atkins, fresh-faced, does his sentry-go in brick-red tunic and white pith-helmet, and at the other side of which swarthy Sancho Panza y Toro, in projecting cap and long blue coat, fondles a rifle in the bend of his arm, can readily be flooded; and the bare, sheer, lofty north front, with scores of cannon of the deadliest modern pattern lying in wait behind the irregular embrasures that grimly pit its surface, hardly invites attack. It frowns a calm but determined defiance; and even the Cid himself might be excused if he turned on his heel and puffed a meditative cigarette after he had surveyed it.

British Spain is small, being but one and seven-eighth square miles English in area; but it is mighty strong. The population, comprising the garrison, is less than fifteen thousand; but behind that slender cipher of souls are the millions of the broadest and biggest of empires. I do not know what the population of the cemetery is, but it receives rapid and numerous accessions at each periodical outbreak of cholera. I paid a visit to it—I have a fondness for sauntering in God's acre—and arrived in time to witness a funeral. When the coffin was laid in the grave, a young man, probably the husband of the deceased, threw himself prone on the turf beside the open burial-trench, and burst into such a passionate tempest of heart-rending sobs and moans and wailings, that I had to move away. These Southerners are more demonstrative in their grief than the men of the North. I question if their sorrows spring from deeper depths, or are so lasting. The caretaker of the cemetery, an elderly Tipperary soldier, with a short dudheen in his mouth, was seated smoking on a head-stone by a goat-willow. We got into conversation.

"There were worse places than Gib—singing-birds were raysonable here, and some of them had rayl beautiful plumage."

My countryman, like the Duke of Argyll, had a weakness for ornithology.

"That spread of land beyant was where the races were held, and small-arm parties from the fleet sometimes kem ashore and practised there. They used to play cricket there, too. The symmetry wasn't a gay place, but there were worse. There were some beautiful tombs—now there was a parable ov wan; 'twas put up by their frinds to some officers who were dhrownded while they were crossing a flooded sthrame on their way back from a shooting excursion. The car-drivers, who were dhrownded wid them, had no monument. 'Twas a quare world; a poor man had the chance of dying wid a rich man, but was not to be berrid in his company. Well, he supposed it was for the best," and here he hammered the heel-tap out of his pipe on the side of his shoe; "when the last bugle sounded a field-officer would feel uncomfortable like if he had to be looking for his bones in the same plot wid a lance-corporal."

Truly, a queer world. Death with impartial summons knocks at the cabin of the poor and the palace of the wealthy; but in the undertaker's interest the equality of the grave must not be conceded. The plebeian who commits felo de se is served properly if he is hidden at the cross-roads by night and a stake driven through his body. The lunatic King who drowns himself, and drags his doctor to the same fate—who is a suicide duplicated with the suspicion of murder—is embalmed and laid to rest in consecrated ground amid incense and music, lights and flowers, the tolling of bells, and the chanting of dirges.

The funeral was over; they were just finishing the De Profundis. My countryman had to quit me. "Oyeh! that fellow who was making such a lamentation might be married agin in a twelvemonth. The army plan was the best; after the 'Dead March' in Saul came 'Tow-row-row.'—another so'jer was to be had for a shilling. He did not drink; he thanked me all the same—had taken the pledge from Father Mathew whin he was a boy, and meant to stick by it; but he would accept the price of a singing-bird he had set his mind upon, since it was pressed upon him."

Gibraltar is but a huge garrison. In the moat by the gate, as I re-entered, a big drummer and a tiny mannikin-soldier with cymbals were practising how to lead off a marching-past tune. The "Fortune of War" tavern elbows "Horse-Barrack Lane;" a print of "The Siege of Kars" is side by side in a shop-window with Dr. Bennett's "Songs for Soldiers." The Plazas and Calles of the mainland of Spain have been parted with. The names of streets, hostelries, and stores are English. Instead of tiendas and almacenes and fondas, you have fancy repositories, regimental shoe-shops, and porter-houses. There, for example, is the celebrated "Cock and Bottle," and farther on "The Calfs Head Hotel." If you traverse Cathedral Square, no larger than an ordinary-sized skittle-alley, you arrive by Sunnyside Steps to the Europa Pass. Notices are posted by the roadside cautioning against plucking flowers or treading on the beds under pain of prosecution. But the bazaar bewilders you with its alien figures, its confusion of tongues, and its eccentric contrasts of dress. In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby; bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while you are lost in admiration of a burly negro, turbaned and in grass-green robe, with face black and shiny as a newly-polished stove, you are hustled by a sailor on cordial terms with himself who is vigorously attempting to whistle "Garry Owen."

But above and before all, the sights and sounds are military. Sappers and linesmen and artillerists pullulate at every corner; fatigue-parties are confronted at every turn; the bayonet of the sentinel flashes in every angle of the fortress from the minute the sun, bursting into instantaneous radiance from behind the great barrier of craggy hill, lights up the town and bastions and moles, until the boom of the sunset-gun gives signal for the gates to be closed. Every tavern looks like a canteen; the gossip is of things martial; the music is that of the reveille or tattoo—the blare of brass, the rub-a-dub of parchment, or the shrill sound-revel of Highland pipes (for there is usually a Scotch regiment here). The ladies one meets all have husbands, or fathers, or uncles in the Service; even the children—those of English parents well understood—keep step as they walk, and the boys amongst them compliment any well-dressed stranger with a home face by rendering him the regulation salute. This is highly gratifying to the civilian sojourning in the place; for he insensibly succumbs to the genius loci, squares his shoulders, expands his chest, and feels that if he is not an officer he ought to be one.

Except the enterprising gentry who devote themselves to cheating the Spanish excise by smuggling cigars and English goods across the border, the Scorpions live by and on the garrison, and therefore do I name their habitat Sutlersville. "Scorpion," I should add, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is the sobriquet conferred by Tommy Atkins on the natives of the Rock, as that of "Smiches" is merrily applied by him to the Maltese, and of "Yamplants" to the denizens of St. Helena. There is a tolerable infusion of English blood among the Scorpions, but it is hardly of the healthiest or most respectable.

Gib is familiar to thousands of Englishmen, but it must be unfamiliar to many thousands more. This is my excuse for exhuming some notes of my stay there. Don't be afraid, I am not going to pester you with guide-book erudition. Let others take you to the galleries and caves, lead you up the ascent to the Moorish tower, inform you that the one spot in Europe where there is an indigenous colony of monkeys (the patriarch of which is styled the "town major") is here, and enlighten you as to the interesting fact that this is the only locality out of Ireland where the Irish jaunting-car is to be objurgated. Mine be a humbler task.

Society in Gib is select, but limited. It is uniform, like the clothes of the influential portion of the inhabitants. Gib is the wrong place to bring out a young lady, though Major Dalrymple's daughters, immortalized in Lever's novel, could not well have found a better hunting-ground. But then Major Dalrymple's daughters were regular garrison hacks—so the irreverent subs of the Rovers used to call them—and never stood a chance beside the daughters of the county families. There are racing and chasing at the station, and theatricals and balls. I arrived at the wrong season. The three days' local racing, for horses of every breed but English, was over, and most of the men were going to Cadiz by special boat next day, en route for the Jerez races, which are the best—indeed, I might almost say the solitary—meeting in Spain.

"There are only two things in this land worth talking about," said an English merchant to me at Cadiz; "the steamers of Lopez and the races of Jerez."

The hunting (thanks to brave old Admiral Fleming for having started that diversion) was over too. The meets have to come off, naturally, outside the frontier of British Spain. The sport is pretty good—one cannot quite expect the Melton country, of course—the riding hard, and the horses invariably Spanish; no English horses would do, for no English horse would be equal to climbing up a perpendicular bank with sixteen stone on his back, and that is a feat the native steeds, bestridden by British warriors in pink who follow the Calpe pack, have sometimes to accomplish. There is a Spanish lyrical and theatrical troop in the town; but it is Holy Week, and lyricals and theatricals are under taboo. Occasionally charity concerts are given by amateurs, and plays are even performed in Lent Champagne, of the Fizzers, has won a reputation by his success on the boards when he dons the habiliments of lovely woman beyond a certain age. But, as I told you before, I arrived at the wrong season. There are no balls at the Convent, which is the Governor's residence; and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate, at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not fair, and—tell it not out of mess—they say she has a tongue.

At this particular time, you perceive, this fortified fragment of the empire was dull; but usually it is gay, and the officer quartered there has always an excellent opportunity of learning his trade and acquiring skill in the gentlemanly game of billiards. He can make maps and surveys of the neutral ground, and watch the guard mounting on the Alameda, or read the account of the siege in Drinkwater's days; and when he tires of the green cloth and its distractions, and of his own noble profession, he can throw a sail to the breeze in the unequalled Bay, or take a flying trip to Tarifa to sketch the beautiful from the living model, or go to Ceuta to see the Spanish galley-slaves and disciplinary regiments, forgetful of our own chain-gangs; or steam across to Tangier to riot in Nature and a day's pig-sticking.

The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa—these are the three delights of Gibraltar.

You have heard of the Bay of Naples, and the Bay of Dublin, which equals it in Paddy Murphy's estimation. I know both; and Gibraltar, the little-spoken-of, leaves them nowhere. The sky, and the undulating mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of yellowing purple and rosy gold!

The Alameda is a bower of Venus cinctured by Mars. Here is a gravelled expanse bounded by hill and sea, with cosy benches under the shade of palmitos—the civilization of the West in alliance with the rich vegetation of the East. Sometimes, in the morning, five hundred men or more—garrison artillery, engineers, and infantry—muster there, previous to marching to their posts; there is a banging of drums, a blowing of bugles, a bobbing vision of cocked-hats, and a roar of hoarse words of command—all the pomp and pride and circumstance of glorious war before the fighting begins. Sometimes, in the evening, a band plays, and the Alameda is the resort of fashion and of nursery-maids.

Tarifa, shining in the sunset across the water, is a tempting morsel for the landscape-painter, and the dwellers in Tarifa are the best teachers of Spanish. A British subaltern bent on improving his mind could encounter an infinitely better preceptor there than "Jingling Johnny," the self-appointed professor to the garrison, who hires himself on Monday, makes you a present of a guitar-tutor on Tuesday, and asks you to favour him with six months' payment in advance on Wednesday. To be sure, the Spanish those Tarifans speak is slightly Arabified; but their tones of voice are persuasive, and their methods of teaching agreeable. The professor taken by the British subaltern is invariably a female, and the females of Tarifa are not the ugliest in the world. They still retain many customs peculiar to their Moorish ancestors. They wear a manta, not a mantilla—a sort of large-hooded mantle, with which they hide the light of their countenance, except an eye—but that is a piercer, ye gods I and they keep it open for business. When a stranger passes, especially if he looks like a sucking lieutenant from the fortress beyond, the manta falls, disclosing the soft loveliness beneath, and the wearer affects a pretty confusion, and hastens with judicious slowness to re-adjust its folds. The British subaltern reels to his quarters seriously wounded, and may be seen the following morning, with his hair blown back, spouting poetry to the zephyrs on Europa Point. Oh no!—that only occurs in romances; but he may be seen drinking brandy-and-soda moderately in the Club-House.

Poor British subaltern! How Sutlersville does exploit him! He is a sheep, and bears his fleecing without a kick. Watch those lazy, lounging, able-bodied, smoking, and salivating loons who prop up every street-corner, and monopolize the narrow pathways—these all live by him; they eat up his substance, and fatten thereupon. These are the touting and speculating sons of the Rock, the veritable Scorpions, who are ever ready to find the "cap'n" a dog or a horse or a boat, or something not so harmless, to help him on the road to ruin, and whisper in his ear what a fine fellow he is—"As ver fine a fellow—real gemman—as Lord Tomnoddy, who give me such a many dollars when he go away." The first word these loons pronounce after coming into the world must be baksheesh. They are born with beggary in their mouths, and the British subaltern acts as if he were born to be their victim. There he is below, of every type, lolling outside the hotel-door that looks on that Commercial Square which is so thorough a barrack-square, with its romping children, its dogs, its dust, its guard-house with chatting soldiers on a form in front, and the important sentinel pacing to and fro, regular and rigid as a pendulum, keeping vigilant watch and ward over nothing in particular. We have a rare company to-day; besides the engineers and bombardiers, and the linesmen of the 24th, 31st, 71st, and 81st, the four infantry regiments on the station, we have men on leave from Malta. They came up to the races, and are waiting for the P. and O. steamer to take them back. That fat little customer is your sporting sub. I only wonder he is not in cords, tops, and spurs. What a hearty voice he talks in! He asks for the Field as if he were giving a view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel and the new drill, you would imagine he was bound to put the extinguisher on Marlborough, Wellington, Wolseley, and the rest of them; and yet the chances are, if you meet him twenty years hence, he will be a captain on the recruiting service, with no forces to marshal but six growing children. Then there is the sentimental sub, the perfect ladies' man, who plays croquet and the flute, pleads guilty to having cultivated the Nine, and affects a simpering pooh-pooh when he is impeached with having inspired that wicked but so witty bit of scandal in the local paper. By singularity of pairing, his fast friend is the muscular sub, who walks against time, and can write his initials with a hundredweight hanging from his index-finger.

Happy dogs in the heyday of life, all of them; how I envy them their buoyant spirits, their rollicking enjoyment of to-day, and their contempt for the morrow! But the morrow will come nevertheless, and with it Black Care will come often. Gib is a haunt of the Hebrews; they or their myrmidons beset the subaltern at genial hours, after luncheon or after mess, pester him with vamped-up knick-knacks for sale, appeal to him to patronize a poor man by buying articles he does not and never by any means can want—"pay me when you likes, Cap'n, one yearsh, two yearsh." The "cap'n," who may have left Sandhurst but six months, may be weakly good-natured, and ignore the fact that his income is not elastic; some day that he thinks of taking a run to England Ben Solomon, who seems to be able to read the books in the Adjutant-General's Office through the walls, pounces upon him with his little bill, and he is arrested if he cannot satisfy his Jewish benefactor. Loans are advanced at a high rate "per shent" by the harpies, and enable him to stave off the temporary embarrassment; the "cap'n" is happy for the moment, but the reckoning is only deferred that it may grow. The arrival of Black Care is adjourned, not averted. The plain truth of it is, Gibraltar is a den of thieves, and has been the burial-pit of many a promising young fellow's hopes. There are two tariffs for everything—one for natives, the other for the British subaltern and the British tourist; and the British subaltern and the British tourist are foolish enough to submit to the extortion in most cases. With some half-dozen honourable exceptions, the traders are what is popularly known as "Jews" in their mode of dealing. They cozen on principle, sell articles that will not last, and charge preposterous prices for them; they impose upon the young officer's softness or delicate gentlemanly feeling, and consider themselves smart for so doing. In this manner Gibraltar, with all its discomforts, is dearer than the most expensive and luxurious quarter in the British Isles.

But we have other specimens of the genus officer in the lounging slaughterers by profession, who are so busy killing time. The lean bronzed aristocratic major, whose temper long years in India have not soured; the squat pursy paymaster (why are paymasters so fearfully inclined to fat?); the raw-boned young surgeon with the Aberdeen accent; "the ranker," erect and grizzled, and looking ever so little not quite at his ease, you know, for the languid lad with fawn-coloured moustache straddling on the chair beside him is an Honourable; the jovial portly Yorkshireman, who is in the Highland Light Infantry, naturally; and the lively loud-voiced Irishman, laughing consumedly at his own jokes—all are here, conversing, smoking, mildly chaffing each other, and exchanging "tips" as to the next Derby. They make a book in a quiet way, and occasionally invest in a dozen tickets in a Spanish lottery. What will you? One cannot perpetually play shop, and the British officer has a rooted objection to it, although he does his duty like a man when the tug of war arises. Better that he should join in a regimental sweepstakes, or lose what he can afford to lose to a comrade, than give way to the blues. He does not gamble or curse, like his Spanish confrère; his potations are not deep, nor is he quick to quarrel. Then let him race on the Neutral Ground; let him hunt with the Calpe pack; and let him back his fancy for the big event at Epsom. Those are his chief excitements at Gib, and help to give a fillip to life in that circumscribed microcosm, pending the anxiously expected morn when the route will come, or, mayhap, the call to active service, in one of those petty wars which are constantly breaking the monotony of this so-called pacific reign.

"Guard, turn out!" cries the Highland Light Infantry sentinel under my window, and the smart soldier laddies fall in for the inspection of the officer of the day. What a thoroughly military town it is! By-and-by the evening gun booms from the heights above, where Sergeant Munro, taking time from his sun-dial and the town major, notifies the official sunset. Bang go the gates. We are imprisoned. Anon the streets are traversed by patrols in Indian file to warn loiterers to return to barracks, the pipers of the 71st skirl a few wild tunes on Commercial Square, the buglers sound the last post, the second gun-fire is heard, and a hush falls over the town, broken only by the challenges of sentries or their regular echoing footfalls on their weary beats. The thunder of artillery wakes you in the morning anew, and if you venture out for a walk before breakfast you thread your way through waggons of the army train or fatigue-parties in white jackets. You stumble across cannon and symmetric pyramids of shot where you least expect them; the line of sea-wall is intersected by figures in brick-red tunic, moving back and forward on ledges of masonry; the morning air is alive with drum-beats and bugle and trumpet-calls; everything is of the barrack most barrack-like; the broad arrow is indented in large deep character on the Rock. It is impossible to shake off the Ordnance atmosphere. The Irish jaunting-cars are all driven by the sons of soldiers' wives; the clergy-men are all military chaplains; those goats are going up to be milked for the major's delicate daughter; that lady practising horse exercise in a ring in her garden is wife to Pillicoddy of the Control Department, and is merely correcting the neglected education of her youth; the very monkeys—diminishing sadly, it grieves me to say—recall associations of the mess-room, for you never fail to hear of that terrible sportsman, "one of Cardwell's gents," who thought it excellent fun to shoot one some time ago. Luckily, the rules of the service did not permit him to be tried by court-martial, or the wretched boy might have been ordered out for instant execution, so great was the indignation. But if he was not shot he was roasted as fearfully as ever St. Laurence was; he was reminded a thousand times if once that fratricide is a fearful crime, and if ever Nemesis visits his pillow it will be in the shape of a monkey without a tail.

One wearies of the same scenes of beauty, and would fain barter the Cork Woods for the chestnuts in Bushy Park; the bright Bay and the watchet sky pall on the senses, and a dull river and drab clouds would be welcomed for change. The day rises when the conversation of the same set, the stories repeated as often as that famous one of grouse in the gun-room, and the stale jokes anent the Sheeref of Wazan and the rival innkeepers of Tangier, black Martin and "Lord James," cloy like treacle; the fiction palmed upon the latest novice that he must go and have a few shots at the monkeys, if he wishes to curry favour at headquarters, misses fire; the calls of the P. and O. steamers, and the thought that their passengers within a week either have seen, or will see, the little village works its effect; even bull-fighting is adjudged a bore, and one sighs for Regent Street and the "Rag and Famish," flaxen ringlets, and roast bee£ A twelvemonth might pass pleasantly on the Rock; but after that the "damnable iteration" of existence must jar on the nerves like the note of a cuckoo. Still, as my philosopher of the cemetery remarked, there are worse places—far worse, Assouan and Aden, for example; so let not the gallant gentleman repine whom Fate has assigned to a round of duty in Sutlersville. For Tommy Atkins of the rank and file, it is wearisome when he is young; he should not be asked to stay there longer than a twelvemonth while he is at the age which yearns for novelty, and during that twelvemonth he should be drilled as at the depôt. For the old soldier it is a good station, and should be made a haven of rest.

CHAPTER V.

From Pillar to Pillar—Historic Souvenirs—Off to Africa—The Sweetly Pretty Albert—Gibraltar by Moonlight—The Chain-Gang—Across the Strait—A Difficult Landing—Albert is Hurt—"Fat Mahomet"—The Calendar of the Centuries Put Back—Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar—Our Hotel—A Coloured Gentleman—Seeing the Sights—Local Memoranda—Jewish Disabilities—Peep at a Photographic Album—The Writer's Notions on Harem Life.

I was gradually getting into the mood of Pistol, and cried a foutra for the world of business and worldlings base. My soul was longing for "Africa and golden joys." Here I was at the elbow, so to speak, of the mysterious Continent, where the geographers set down elephants for want of towns. Why should I not visit it? I might never have such a chance again. I stood in the shadow of one Pillar of Hercules. Why not make pilgrimage to the other? Having notched Calpe on my staff, I resolved to add Abyla to the record.

I was the more inclined to this, as I had recollection that Tangier had been part of the British dominions for one-and-twenty years. In 1662 Catharine of Braganza, the "olivader-complexioned queen of low stature, but prettily shaped," whose teeth wronged her mouth by sticking a little too far out, brought it as portion of her dowry to Charles II. The 2nd, or Queen's Own Regiment, was raised to garrison the post, and sported its sea-green facings, the favourite colour of her Majesty, for long in the teeth of the threatening Moors. The 1st Dragoons still bear the nickname of "the Tangier Horse," and were originally formed from some troops of cuirassiers who assisted in the defence of the African stronghold for seventeen years; and the 1st Foot Regiment owes its title of "Royal" to the distinction it gained by capturing a flag from the Moors in 1680. That was the year when old John Evelyn noted in his diary that Lord Ossorie was deeply touched at having been appointed Governor and General of the Forces, "to regaine the losses we had lately sustain'd from the Moors, when Inchqueene was Governor." His lordship relished the commission so little—indeed, it was a forlorn errand—that he took a malignant fever after a supper at Fishmongers' Hall, went home, and died. In 1683 the Merry Monarch caused the works of Tangier to be blown up, and abandoned the place, declaring it was not worth the cost of keeping. The Merry Monarch was not prescient. A century afterwards Gibraltar was indebted for a large proportion of its supplies, during the great siege, to the dismantled and deserted British-African fortress. For many reasons Tangier was not to be missed.

By a happy coincidence a party of three in the Club-House Hotel—a retired army captain, his wife, and a lady companion—were anxious to take a trip to Africa. We agreed to go together, and had scarcely made up our minds, when another retired captain, who habitually resided in Tangier, gratified us by the information that he was returning there, and would be happy to give us every assistance in his power. Retired Captain No. 1 was a jolly fellow, fond of good living and not overburdened with æstheticism—a capital specimen of a hearty Yorkshireman. He looked after the provand. His wife, portly and short of temper, was as good-natured as he. She insisted on discharging the bills. The lady-companion was thin, accomplished, and melancholy. She kept us in sentiment. Retired Captain No. 2 was a fellow-countryman of mine, bright-brained and waggish. He was the walking guide-book, with philosophy and friendship combined. I was nigh forgetting one, and not by any means the least important, member of the party—Albert. Mrs. Captain introduced him to me as a sweetly pretty creature. At her request I looked after him. Tastes vary as to what constitutes beauty, but I candidly think a broad thick head, crop ears, a flattish nose, and heavy jowls could not be called sweetly pretty without straining a point; and all these Albert possessed. He was a bull-dog (I believe his real name was Bill, and that he had been brought up in Whitechapel). As a bull-dog he had excellent points, and might be esteemed a model of symmetry and breeding by the fancy, or even pronounced a beauty and exquisitely proportioned by connoisseurs; but sweetly pretty—never! I could not stomach that, especially when Albert growled and laid bare his ruthless set of sound white teeth.

Before leaving Gibraltar I had two novel sensations, nocturnal and matutinal. The first was a view of the Bay by moonlight, the white crescent shining clearly down on a portion of the inner waters brinded by shipping, and on the outer spread of sleepy, cadenced wavelets rippling phosphorescently under the pallid rays. By the Mole were visible the outlines of barques, steamers, coal-brigs, and xebecs; away to the left were the Catapult and a few of her mosquito companions; and far out rode at anchor a stately frigate of the United States' fleet. The twinkling lamps of the city afloat sending out reddish lines, and the fuller, clearer, luminous pencillings of the gas-lamps of the city ashore, made a not ungrateful contrast to the quivering chart of poetic moonbeams. Bending over their edge were the deep shadows of the massive Rock; and bounding them, at the other side, the barren foot-hills of Algeciras mellowed into a phantom softness by distance and the night.

Next morning, as I strolled by the sea-wall towards the Ragged Staff Battery, I saw a sight that took away my appetite for breakfast. Pacing slowly to their work to the music of clanking chains was a column of wretched convicts.[A] What haggard faces, with low foreheads, sunken eyes, and dogged moody expression or utter blankness of expression! Purely animal the most of that legion of despair and desperation looked, and sallow and sickly of complexion. They were a blot on the fresh sunshine. How hideous their coarse garb of pied jackets branded with the broad arrow, their knickerbockers and clumsy shoes! Wistfully they moved along, hardly daring to glance at me, through fear of the turnkeys with loaded rifles marching at their sides. I almost felt that, if I had the power, I would demand their release, as did the Knight of La Mancha that of the criminals on their way to the galleys, although they might have been as ungrateful as Gines de Passamonte; but those hang-dog countenances banished impulses of chivalry.

The little steamer, the Spahi, which conveyed us across the Strait, was seaworthy for all her cranky appearance, and made the passage of thirty-two miles quickly and comfortably for all her roughness of accommodation. She was a cargo-boat, but her skipper was English, and did his best to make the ladies feel at home. Besides, Captain No. 1 had brought a select basket of provisions and a case of dry, undoctored champagne. One of our first experiences as we cleared Algeciras, with turrets like our martello-towers sentinelling the hills, and the three-masted wreck—"Been twenty-one days there," said the skipper, "and not an effort has been made to raise it yet, and not even a warning light is hung over it at night"—was to sight a bottle-nosed whale puffing and spewing its predatory course.

"What are those ruins upon the Spanish shore for?" asked the accomplished lady.

When she was informed that they were the beacons raised in the days of old, when the Moorish corsairs haunted that coast, and that the moment the pirate sail was descried in the offing (I hope this is correctly nautical) the warning fire blazed by night, or the warning plume of smoke went up by day, to summon Spain's chivalry to the rescue, she was enchanted, and recited a passage from Macaulay's "Armada."

We made the transit in a little over three hours, and, rounding the Punta de Malabata, cut into the Bay of Tangier, and eased off steam at some distance from the Atlantic-washed shore. There is no pier, but a swell and discoloration, projecting in straight line seawards, marks where a mole had once stood. That was a piece of British handiwork; but the Moor, who is no more tormented by the demon of progress than the Turk, had literally let it slide, until it sank under the waters.

The Sultana of Moorish cities Tangier is sometimes called, and truly she does wear a regal, sultana-like air as seen from afar, cushioned in state on the hillside, her white flat roofs rising one above another like the steps of a marble staircase, the tall minarets of the mosques piercing the air, and the multitudinous many-coloured flags of all nations fluttering above the various consulates. But in this, as in so many other instances, it is distance which lends enchantment to the view.

We went as near to the shore as we could in small boats, and when we grounded, a fellowship of clamouring, unkempt, half-naked Barbary Jews, skull-capped, with their shirts tied at their waists and short cotton drawers, rushed forward to meet us, and carry us pickaback to dry land. The ladies were borne in chairs, slung over the shoulders of two of these amphibious porters, or on an improvised seat made by their linked hands, but to preserve their equilibrium the dear creatures had to clasp their arms tightly round the necks of the natives. This would not look well in a picture, above all if the lady were a professional beauty. But there was nothing wrong in it, any more than in Amaryllis clinging to the embrace of Strephon in the whirling of a waltz. Custom reconciles to everything. On stepping into the small boat I had my first difficulty with Albert. I trod on his tail. The dog looked reproachfully, but did not moan. His mistress scowled, and warned me to take care what I was about for an awkward fool. Her husband, with a pained look on his face, mutely apologized for her, and I humbly excused myself and vowed amendment. I am not revengeful, but I did enjoy it when one of the porters, tottering under the weight of the fat lady, made a false step and nearly gave her a sousing. I clambered on my particular Berber's back, dear Albert in my arms, and we splashed merrily along; but Captain No. 1, who turned the scales at seventeen stone two pounds, had not so uneventful a landing. Twice his bearer halted, and the warrior, abandoning himself to his fate, swore he would make the Berber's nose probe the sand if he stumbled.

As I was discharged on the beach, I was confronted by a majestic Moor. His grave brown face was fringed with a closely-trimmed jet-black beard, and his upper lip was shaded with a jet-black moustache. He wore a white turban and a wide-sleeved ample garment of snowy white, flowing in graceful folds below his knees; and on his feet were loose yellow slippers, peaked and turned up at the toes. This was Mahomet Lamarty, better known as "Fat Mahomet," who had acted as interpreter to the British troops in the Crimea, and who, at this period, was making an income by supplying subalterns from Gib with masquerade suits to take home and horses to ride. Mahomet in his sphere was a great man. He was none of your loquacious valets de place, no courier of the Transcendental school. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was a Hadji; he was a chieftain of a tribe in the vicinity, and had fought in the war against the Spanish infidels; he could borrow his purest and finest Arab from the Kadi; he was free to the sacred garden of the Shereef, or Pope-Sultan, one of the descendants of the Prophet, Allah be praised!

Mahomet, who was known to both the Captains, passed our small impedimenta through the custom-house—there is an orthodox custom-house, though there is no proper accommodation for shipping—and we trailed at his heels up the close, crowded, rough alleys which did duty as streets. It would be hard to imagine a more thorough-going change than our scurry across the waves had effected. We were in another world completely. We had been transported as on the carpet of the magician. It was as if the calendar had been put back for centuries, and the half-forgotten personages of the "Thousand-and-One Nights" were revivified and had their being around us.

Tangier is a walled and fortified town; but Vauban had no hand in the fortifications, and it is my private opinion the walls would go down before a peremptory horn-blast quicker than those of Jericho. It swarms with a motley population much addicted to differences in shades of complexion. The Tangerines exhaust the primitive colours and most of the others in their features. There are lime-white Tangerines, copper and canary-countenanced Tangerines, olive and beetroot-hued Tangerines, Tangerines of the tint of the bottom of pots, Tangerines of every—no, I beg to recall that, there are no well-defined blue or green Tangerines; at least, none that came under my ken. The town is as old as the hills and courageously uncivilized. There is no gasholder, no railway-station, no theatre, no cab-stand, no daily paper, and no drainage board to go into controversy over. It is unconsciously backward, near as it is to Europe—a rifle-shot off the track of ships plying from the West to the ports of the Mediterranean. It preserves its Eastern aroma with a fine Moslem conservatism. Its ramparts of crumbling masonry are ornamented with ancient cannon useless for offence, useless for defence. There is said to be a saluting-battery; but the legend runs that the gunners require a week's clear notice before firing a salute.[B] There is no locomotion save in boxes and on the backs of quadrupeds; and quadrupeds of the inferior order are usually, when overtaken by death, thrown in the streets to decompose. But if the irregularity of the town would galvanize the late Monsieur Haussmann in his grave, its situation would satisfy the most exacting Yankee engineer. It is huddled in a sheltered nest on the fringe of a land of milk and honey; it has the advantage of a spread of level beach, and rejoices in the balmiest of climes.

The streets are so narrow that you could light a cigar from your neighbour's window on the opposite side; but there is no window, neither at this side nor the other. A hole with a grating is the only window that is visible. Moors are jealous, and to be able to appreciate their household comforts you must first succeed in turning their houses inside out. Those who have dived into the recesses say the fruit is as savoury as the husk is repulsive. The windowless houses with their backs grudgingly turned to the thoroughfares are low for the most part, and the thoroughfares are—oh! so crooked—zigzag, up and down, staggering in a drunken way over hard cobble-stones and leading nowhere. There are mosques and stores entered by horse-shoe arches, a bazaar dotted over with squatting women, cowled with dirty blankets, selling warm griddle-cakes; moving here and there are the same spectral figures, similar dirty blankets veiling them from head to foot; over the way are cylinders of mat, with nets caging the apertures at each end, to hold the cocks and hens, rabbits and pigeons, brought for sale by Riffians, descendants of the corsairs of that ilk, stalwart, brown, and bare-legged, with heads shaven but for the twisted scalp-lock left for the convenience of Asrael when he is dragging them up to Paradise. Hebrews have their standings around, and deal in strips of cotton, brass dishes, and slippers, or change money, or are ready for anything in the shape of barter. Seated in the shade of that small niche in the wall, as on a tailor's shop-board, is an adool, or public notary, selling advice to a client; in the alcove next him is a worker in beads and filigree; from a dusty forge beyond comes the clang of anvils, where half-naked smiths are hammering out bits or fashioning horse-shoes. Mules with Bedouins perched, chin on shin, amid the bales of merchandise on their backs, cross the bazaar at every moment; or files of donkeys, stooping under bundles of faggots, pick their careful way. By-and-by—but this is not a frequent sight—a Moslem swell ambles past on a barb, gorgeous in caparisons, the enormous peaked saddle held in its place by girths round the beast's breast and quarters, and covered with scarlet hammer-cloth. If we move about and examine the stalls, we see lumps of candied sweetmeats here; charms, snuff-boxes made of young cocoanuts and beads there; and jars of milk or baskets of dates elsewhere. At the fountain yonder, contrived in the wall, mud approached by rugged, sloppy steps, water-carriers, wide-mouthed negro slaves, male and female, with brass curtain-rings in their ears, and skins blacker than the moonless midnight, come and go the whole day long, and gossip or wrangle with loafers in coarse mantles and burnous of stuff striped like leopard-skin. Beside the silent, gliding, ghost-like Mahometan women and the Hottentot Venus, you have Rebecca in gaudy kerchief and Doña Dolores in silken skirt and lace mantilla from neighbouring Spain. In the mingling crowd all is novelty, all is noise, all is queer and shifting and diversified.

The hotel where we put up was owned by Bruzeaud, formerly a messman of a British regiment. It was approached by a filthy lane, and commanded a prospect of a square not much larger than a billiard-table. In the middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, which made up for his stupidity; we had a single agreeable fellow-guest in a Frenchman, who spoke Arabic, and had lived in the city of Morocco as a pretended follower of the Prophet; and, besides, there was that dry undoctored champagne, which it is permissible to drink at all meals in Africa.

There was another hotel in Tangier, a more pretentious establishment, owned by one Martin—surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English county Englishmen were born black, and when I said in none, he gravely ejaculated that in that case Martin was a liar, and habitually ate dirt. To avert possible complications into which I might have been drawn, I had to hasten to explain that Martin might possibly have been born in a part of England known as the Black Country. He had served in the steward's department on the ship of war where the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Alfred and a middy, was picking up seamanship. Hence his Jove-like hauteur. He had rubbed-skirts with Royalty, and to his fetter-shadowed soul some of the divinity which hedges kings and their relatives had adhered to him. I never met a darkey who could put on such fearful and wonderful airs. Where he did not order he condescended. He showed me an Irish constabulary revolver which he had received from "his old friend, Lord Francis Conyngham—'pon honour, he was delighted to meet him. It was good for sore eyes—who'd a-thought of his turning up there!" Splendidly inflated Martin was when he spoke of "his servants." This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale odor stirpis cannot be eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the scent of the nigger, che puzzo! would hang round him still. He was a great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country house a few miles off.

The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber—Mahomet Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every spring—for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range, and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are generally built of chalk and flint (tabia) on the ground-floor, and of bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon, provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is by cozening his neighbour. At this semi-European edge of Africa he enjoys comparative license, although he is forced to appear in skull-cap and a long narrow robe of a dark colour something like a priest's soutane. But the son of Israel when he has a taste for finery (and which of them has not?) compensates for the gloom of his outer garment by wearing an embroidered vest, a girdle of some bright hue, and white drawers.

The daughters of Israel—but my conscience charges me with want of gallantry towards them in a previous chapter, and now I can honestly relieve it and win back their favour. They are the only beautiful women who mollify the horizon of Tangier: the Mahometan ladies are not visible, those of Spanish descent are coarse, and of English are washed-out; while their lips are against the negresses. I have a batch of photographs of females in an album—aye, of believers in the Prophet amongst them, for it is a folly to imagine you cannot obtain that which is forbidden. Hercules, I fancy, must have overcome with a golden sword the dragon that watched the gardens of the Hesperides—which, by the way, were in the neighbourhood of Tangier, if Apollodorus is to be credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes, luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the sands at Ramsgate during the season. There is a photograph before me, as I write, of a Jewish matron, fat, dull, double-chinned, and sleepy-eyed, who must have been a belle before she fell into flesh. She wears massy filigree ear-rings, two strings of precious stones as necklaces, ponderous bracelets, edgings of pearls on her bodice, and rings on all her fingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say, if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed, this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem, taken—no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn, weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is simple—a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no means an attractive piece of flesh and blood, and yet a good sample of the class that go to upholster a seraglio.

I have never had the slightest anxiety to penetrate the secrets of the Moslem household, and I consider the man who would wish to poke his nose into its seclusion no better than Peeping Tom of Coventry—an insolent, lecherous cad. I would not traverse the street to-morrow to inspect the champion wives of the Sultan of Turkey and Shah of Persia amalgamated; and I deserve no credit for it, for I know that they are puppets, and that more engaging women are to be seen any afternoon shopping in Regent Street or pirouetting in the ballets of half-a-dozen theatres.

Your lady of the harem is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ate it.

How do I know this? it may be asked. Who dares to deny it? is my answer.

But here is a digression from our theme of the condition of the Jews at Tangier, and all on account of a few poor photographs! In one sentence, that condition is shameful. It is a reproach to the so-called civilized Powers that they do not interfere to influence the Emir-al-Mumenin to behave with more of the spirit of justice towards his Jewish subjects. In Fez and other cities they have to dwell in a quarter to themselves—"El Melah" (the dirty spot) it is called in Morocco city; and when they leave the Melah they have to go bare-footed. They are not permitted to ride on mules, nor yet to walk on the same side of the street as Arabs.

The late Sir Moses Montefiore, a very exemplary old man in some respects, visited Morocco in his eightieth year to intercede on behalf of his co-religionists, and promises of better treatment were made; but promises are not always kept.

CHAPTER VI.

A Pattern Despotism—Some Moorish Peculiarities—A Hell upon Earth—Fighting for Bread—An Air-Bath—Surprises of Tangier—On Slavery—The Writer's Idea of a Moorish Squire—The Ladder of Knowledge—Gulping Forbidden Liquor—Division of Time—Singular Customs—The Shereef of Wazan—The Christian who Captivated the Moor—The Interview—Moslem Patronage of Spain—A Slap for England—A Vision of Beauty—An English Desdemona: Her Plaint—One for the Newspaper Men—The Ladies' Battle—Farewell—The English Lady's Maid—Albert is Indisposed—The Writer Sums up on Morocco.

The Government in Morocco would satisfy the most ardent admirer of force. It is an unbridled despotism. The Sultan is head of the Church as of the State, and master of the lives and property of his subjects. He dispenses with ministers, and deliberates only with favourites. When favourites displease him, he can order their heads to be taken off. Favourites are careful not to displease him. The land is a terra incognita to Europeans, and is rich in beans, maize, and wool, which are exported, and in wheat and barley, which are not always permitted to be exported. Altogether the form of administration is very primitive and simple. It is a rare privilege for a European to be admitted into the Imperial presence, and indeed the only occasions, one might say, when Europeans have the privilege are those furnished by the visits of foreign Missions to submit credentials and presents. It is advisable for a private traveller not to go to the chief city unless attached to one of these official caravans; but by those who have money a journey to Fez may be compassed with an escort. This escort consists of the Sultan's very irregular soldiers, who are armed with very long and very rusty matchlocks, of a pattern common nowadays in museums and curiosity shops. Ostensibly the escort is intended to protect the traveller from the regularly organized bands of robbers which infest the interior; but the experience of the traveller is that when the robbers swoop down he has to protect the escort. Christians are looked upon as dogs by all the self-satisfied natives, and treated so by some of them when they can be saucy with impunity. It was my lot to be called a dog by a small fanatic, who hissed at me with the asperity and industry of a disturbed gander, and pelted me with stones. But two can play at that game, and that boy will think twice before he lapidates a full-grown Christian again. But he will hate him for evermore, and when he has reached man's estate will teach his son to repeat the doggerel: "The Christian to the hook, the Jew to the spit, and the Moslem to see the sight."

The Sultan collects his revenue (estimated at half a million pounds sterling a year, great part of which is derived from the Government monopoly of the sale of opium) by the aid of his army; but as he never nears the greater portion of his dominions, there must be some nice pickings off that revenue by minor satraps before it reaches his sacred hands. There is quite a phalanx of under-strappers of State in this despotism. For instance, at Tangier there is a Bacha or Governor, a Caliph or Vice-Governor, a Nadheer or Administrator of the Mosques, a Mohtasseb or Administrator of the Markets, and a Moul-el-Dhoor or Chief of the Night Police. There is a leaven of the guild system, too, as in more advanced countries. Each trade has its Amin, each quarter its Mokaderrin. There is a Kadi, or Minister of Worship and Justice, to whom we paid our respects. Justice is quick in its action, and stern in the penalties it inflicts. The legs and hands are cut off pilferers, heads are cut off sometimes and preserved in salt and camphor, and the bastinado is an ordinary punishment for lesser crimes. But the Moors must be thick in the soles, nor is it astonishing, as the practice is to chastise children by beating them on the feet. Mahomet Lamarty volunteered to procure a criminal who would submit to the bastinado for a peseta. In the market-place I compassionated an unfortunate thief minus his right hand and left leg. We took a walk to the prison, which is on the summit of the hill, Captain No. 1 thoughtfully providing himself with a basket of bread. What a hell upon earth was that sordid, stifling, noisome, gloomy keep, with its crowds of starving sore-covered inmates. In filth it was a pig-sty, in smell a monkey-house, in ventilation another Black-hole of Calcutta. Turn to the next page, reader mine, if you are squeamish. Heaven be my witness, I have no desire to minister to morbid tastes; but I have an object in describing this dreadful oubliette, for it still exists—exists within thirty-two miles of British territory, and it is a scandal that some effort is not made to mitigate its horrors. Through the bars of a padlocked door, from which spurt blasts of mephitic heat, we can descry amid the steam of foul exhalations, as soon as our eyes become accustomed to the dimness, a mob of seething, sweating, sweltering captives, like in aspect as a whole to so many gaunt wild beasts. Some are gibbering like fiends, others jabbering like idiots. They are there young and old; a few—the maniacs those—are chained; all are crawled over by vermin, most are crusted with excretions. The sight made me feel faint at the time, the very recollection of it to this day makes my flesh creep. We were fascinated by this peep at the Inferno. The moment these caged wretches caught a glimpse of us they rushed to the door, and on bended knees, or with hands uplifted, or with pinched cheeks pressed against the bars, raised a clamour of entreaty. We drew back as the rancid plague-current smote our faces, and questioned Mahomet by our looks as to what all this meant.

"They want food," he explained.

These prisoners are allowed two loaves a day out of the revenues of the Mosques; but two loaves, even if scrupulously given, which I doubt, are but irritating pittance. They may make cushions or baskets, but their remuneration is uncertain and slender. Those who are lucky get sustenance from relatives in the town, but the majority are half-starving, and are dependent for a full meal on the bounty of chance visitors. We poked a loaf through the bars. It was ravenously snapped at, torn into little bits, and devoured amid the howls of those who were disappointed. Then a loaf was cast over the door. What a savage scramble! The bread was caught, tossed in the air, jumped at, and finally the emaciated rivals fell upon one another as in a football scrimmage, and there was a moving huddle of limbs and a diabolical chorus of shrieks and yells. That could not be done again; it was too painful in result Mahomet undertook to distribute the remainder of our stock through an inlet in the wall, and we drew away sick in head and heart from that den of repulsive degradation, greed, brutality, cruelty, selfishness, and all infuriate and debased passion—that damnable magazine of disease physical and moral. It is undeniable that there were many there whose faces were passport to the Court of Lucifer—murderers, and dire malefactors; but better to have decapitated them than to have committed them to the slow torture of this citadel of woe. There were inmates who had been immured for years—inmates for debt whose hair had whitened in the fetid imprisonment, whose laugh had in it a harsh hollow-sounding jangle, and whose brows had fixed themselves into the puckers of a sullen, hopeless, apathetic submission to fate. Their lack of intelligence was a blessing. Had they been more sensitive they would have been goaded into raging lunacy.

Let us to the outer freshness and make bold endeavour to fling off this weight of nightmare which oppresses us. Passing by the ruinous gate yonder with its wild-looking sentry, we reach the open space where crouching hill-men are reposing on the stunted grass, and ungainly camels, kneeling in a circle, are chewing the cud in patience, or venting that uncanny half-whine, half-bellow, which is their only attempt at conversation. Let us take a long look at the country beyond with its gardens teeming with fruit and musical with bird-voices; walk up to the crown of that slant and survey the valleys, the plateaux, the brushwood, the flower-patches, spreading away to the hills that swell afar until the peaks of the Atlas, cool with everlasting snow, close the view. One is tempted to linger there lovingly, though darkness is falling. There is a gift of blandness and briskness in the very breathing of the air. When you have had your fill of the beauties on the land side, turn to the sea, meet the evening breeze that comes floating up with a flavour of iodine upon it, range round the sweeping vista, from giant Calpe away over the Strait flecked with sails on to Trafalgar, smiling peacefully as if it had never been a bay of blood, and finish by the vision of the great globe of fire descending into the Atlantic billows.

Our stay in Tangier was most gratifying because of its variety and unending surprises. Existence there was out of the beaten track, and kept curiosity on the constant alert. It was a treat to pretend to be Legree, and to negotiate for a strong likely growing nigger-boy. I discovered I could have bought one for ten pounds sterling, a perfect bargain, warranted free from vice or blemish; but as I was not prepared to stop in Africa just then, I did not close with the offer. It may be a shocking admission to make, but if I were to settle down in Morocco, I confess, I should most certainly keep slaves. There is a deal of sentimental drivel spouted about the condition of slaves. Those I have seen seemed very happy. In Morocco they are well treated; and if desirous to change masters the law empowers them to make a demand to that effect. It is true that a slave's oath is not deemed valid, but Cuffy bears the slight with praiseworthy equanimity. I am sure if Cuffy were in my service he would never ask to leave it, and I would teach him to appraise his word as much as any other man's oath (except his master's), by my patented plan for negro-training, based on Mr. Rarey's theories. As the land about Tangier was rated at prairie value—an acre could be had for a dollar—I might have been induced to invest in a holding of a couple of hundred thousands of acres, but that my ship had not yet come within hail of the port. What a healthy, free, aristocratic life, combining feudal dignity with educated zest, a wise man could lead there—if he had an establishment of, say, three hundred slaves, a private band, a bevy of dancing girls, Bruzeaud for chef, an extensive library, sixteen saddle-horses, and relays of jolly fellows from Gibraltar to help him chase the wild boar and tame bores, eat couscoussu, and drink green-tea well sweetened. He should Moorify himself, but he need not change his religion, and if he went about it rightly, I am sure, like the village pastor, he could make himself to all the country dear. Take the educational question, for example. If he were diplomatic he would pay the school-fees of the urchins of Tangier. These are not extravagant—a few heads of barley daily, equivalent to the sod of turf formerly carried by the pupils to the hedge academies in dear Ireland, and a halfpenny on Friday. He should affect an interest in the Koran, and make it a point of applauding the Koran-learned boy when he is promenaded on horseback and named a bachelor. He might—indeed he should—follow the career of his protégé at the Mhersa, where he studies the principles of arithmetic, the rudiments of history, the elements of geometry, and the theology of Sidi-Khalil, until he emerges in a few years a Thaleb, or lettered man. Perhaps the Thaleb may go farther, and become an Adoul or notary, a Fekky or doctor, nay—who knows?—an Alem or sage. Ah! how pleasant that Moorish squire might be by his own ruddy fire of rushes, palm branches, and sun-dried leaves; and what a profit he might make by judicious speculation in jackal-skins, oil, pottery, carpets, and leather stained with the pomegranate bark! He would have his mills turned by water or by horses; he would eat his bread with its liberal admixture of bran; he would rear his storks and rams. The professors who charm snakes and munch live-coals would all be hangers-on of his house; and he would have periodical concerts by those five musicians who played such desert lullabies for us—conspicuously one patriarch whose double-bass was made from an orange-tree—and would not forget to supplement their honorarium of five dollars with jorums of white wine. Sly special pleaders! They argue with the German play-wright: "Mahomet verbot den Wein, doch vom Champagner sprach er nicht."

From the Frenchman at the hotel, whose knowledge of Morocco was "extensive and peculiar," I acquired much of my information on the manners and customs of the people. Watches are only worn and looked at for amusement. Instead of by hours, time is thus noted: El Adhen, an hour before sunrise; Fetour (repast) el Hassoua, or sunrise; Dah el Aly, ten in the morning; El Only, a quarter past twelve; El Dhoor, half-past one; El Asser, from a quarter past three to a quarter to four; El Moghreb, sunset; El Achâ, half-an-hour after sunset; and El Hameir, gun-shot. Meals are taken at Dah el Aly, El Asser, and El Moghreb. The houses are built with elevated lateral chambers, but there is a narrow staircase leading to the Doeria, a reception-room, where visitors can be welcomed without passing the ground-floor. The walls are plastered, and covered with arabesques or verses of the Koran incrusted in colours. The wells inside the houses are only used for cleansing linen; water for drinking purposes is sought outside.

Among many singular customs—singular to us—I noted that a popular remedy for illness is to play music and to recite prayers to scare away the devil. An enlightened Moor might think the practices of the Peculiar People quite as strange, and question the infallibility of cure-all pills at thirteen-pence-halfpenny the box. The dead in Morocco are hurried to their graves at a hand-gallop. That, I submit, is no more unreasonable than many English funeral usages, such as incurring debt for the pomp of mourning. At Moorish weddings the bride is carried in procession in a palanquin to her husband's house amid a fantasia of gunpowder—the reckless rejoicing discharges of ancient muskets in the streets. Well, white favours, gala coaches, and feux de joie at marriages of the great are not entirely unknown among us. Nobody sees the Moorish wife for a year, not even her mother-in-law, which I consider a not wholly unkind dispensation. The Moorish wife paints her toe-nails, which, after all, is a harmless vanity, and less obtrusive than that of the ladies who impart artificial redness to their lips. And, lastly, the Moorish wife waits on her husband. Personally, I fail to discover anything blamable in that act, though I must concede that it is eccentric, very eccentric. These allusions to the Moorish wife in general lead up naturally to one in particular in whom I took a professional interest, for she was as remarkable in her way as Lady Ellenborough or Lady Hester Stanhope, or that strong-minded Irishwoman who married the Moslem, Prince Izid Aly, and whose son reigned after his father's death.

The Shereef has been mentioned. He is the great man of the district, with an authority only second to that of the Sultan himself. Claiming to be a lineal descendant of Mahomet, he is entitled to wear the green turban. His name at full length is long, but not so long as that of most Spanish Infantes—Abd-es-Selam ben Hach el Arbi. He is a saint and a miracle-worker. He has been seen simultaneously at Morocco, Wazan, and Tangier, according to the belief of his co-religionists, wherein he beats the record of Sir Boyle Roche's bird, which was only in two places at once. Like Jacob, he has wrestled with angels. He is head of the Muley-Taib society, a powerful secret organization, which has its ramifications throughout the Islamitic world. He draws fees from the mosques, and has gifts bestowed upon him in profusion by his admirers, who feel honoured when he accepts them. Exalted and wide-spreading is his repute where the Moslem holds sway, and unassailable is his orthodoxy, yet he has had the temerity to take to himself a Christian wife. This lady had been a governess in an American family at Tangier. There the Shereef made her acquaintance, wooed and won her. They were married at the residence of the British Minister Plenipotentiary; the officers of a British man-of-war were present at the ceremony, and slippers and a shower of rice, as at home, followed the bride on leaving the building. The Shereef and, if possible, the Shereefa were personages to be seen, and Mahomet Lamarty was the very man to help us to the favour. His Highness lived four miles away, and we formed a cavalcade one afternoon and set off for his garden, the ladies accompanying us. We passed through cultivated fields of barley and dra (a kind of millet), crossed the river Wadliahoodi, and ascended a road which faced abruptly towards the hills. An agreeable road it was, and not lonesome; we had the carol of birds and the piping of bull-frogs to lighten the way, and leafy branches made reverence overhead. There were abundance of fruit and such beautiful shrubs that I rail at myself for not being botanist enough to be able to enlarge upon them. There were orange-groves, yellow broom, dog-rose, and apples, pears, peaches, apricots, plums, pomegranates, figs, and vines. It was such an oasis as a very young Etonian in the warmth of a midsummer vacation might have likened to Heaven. The range of hills of El Jebel rose left and right, and at parts presented a steep cliff to the ocean. This ridge is about twelve miles in width, and its fertile slopes amply merit to be lauded as the best fruit-producers in the empire, "as bounteous as Paradise itself."

Mahomet Lamarty, who was our guide, entered the Shereef's grounds to prepare for our introduction; and now the ladies, who had insisted on coming with us, rebelled, and said point-blank they would not salute the Shereefa as "Your Highness." They were impatient to see her, but they declined to give countenance to a Christian who had demeaned herself by wedding a heathen.

"The visit was of your own seeking, ladies," I said; "if you are not willing to treat Her Highness with deference, better stay outside."

They were not equal to that sacrifice after riding four miles.

"Who'll start the conversation?" said Captain No. 1. "You start it" (to me) "like a good fellow, and I'll take up the running."

Captain No. 2 said he would hang about for us outside.

Mahomet beckoned to us and we ventured into the garden. Coming down a pathway we saw an austere, swarthy, obese man of the middle height. He was white-gloved, and wore a red fez, a sort of Zouave upper garment of blue, with burnous, baggy trousers, white stockings, and Turkish slippers. It was the Shereef. I had agreed to open the interview, but when it came to the trial my Arabic (I had been only studying it for two hours) abandoned me. Mahomet did the needful. I thanked His Highness for his kindness in admitting us to his demesne, and he smiled a modest, solemn smile, and looked greeting from his small eyes. When he discovered that I had been travelling in Spain, he asked me—always through Mahomet—what they were doing there. On having my reply—that they were tasting the miseries of civil war—translated to him, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and slowly ejaculated:

"Unhappy Spain! Silly, unfortunate people! That is the way with them always. They are at perpetual strife one with another."

And then Mahomet interposed with a parenthesis of his own depreciatory of the Spaniards, whom he loathed and despised. He had fought against them in the war of 1839-1860, and the Shereef had also headed his countrymen, and had shown great courage and coolness in action. His presence had infused a high spirit of enthusiasm into the undisciplined troops.

"Bismillah!" grunted Mahomet. "The Spaniard is beneath contempt. He was almost licked in one battle. He was four months here, and how far did he get into the interior?"

Mahomet conveniently forgot the defeat of Guad-el-ras, the occupation of Tetuan, and the indemnity of four hundred millions of reals which was exacted as the price of peace; but he was literally correct, the victorious O'Donnell did not flaunt his flag beyond a very exiguous strip of the territory of Sidi-Muley-Mahomet.

We were walking as we talked, and by this time had reached the brow of a wooded rise which commanded an uninterrupted prospect of the ocean. The flowery cistus flourished on the eminence, and cork-trees, chestnuts, and willows shielded us from the fierceness of the sun. Behind and around were a succession of richly-planted gardens. We halted, and the Shereef, scanning the horizon in the direction of the Rock, suddenly put a question to me which almost took my breath away:

"Do they buy commissions over the way still?"

"No; that system has been abolished."

"It is well," he remarked, with a scarcely suppressed sneer. "It was incredible that a great nation and a fighting nation should make a traffic of the command of men, as if a clump of spears were a kintal of maize," and as he relapsed into silence a soldierly fire gleamed in his irides, his frame seemed to straighten and swell, and the nature of the prophet retired before that of the warrior.

From where we stood we could ferret out a house with a veranda in front, built on a terrace and begirt with trees. That was the residence of His Highness; but we turned our eyes in another direction, lest we should be suspected of rude curiosity by this courteous African. I was trying to divine the tally of years our host had numbered. No Arab knows his own age, and here it may be useful to tell the reader wherein the distinction lies between the Moor and the Arab. Virtually they are the same; but the name of Moor is given to those who dwell in cities, of Arab to those who roam the plains. Mahomet came to my aid. His Highness had whiskers when Tangier was bombarded by Prince de Joinville. That was in August, 1844, a good nine-and-twenty years before, so that Abd-es-Salam must have long doubled the cape of forty, which would leave him considerably the senior of his Frankish wife.

We turned at a noise—the creak of a rustic wooden gate on its hinges; a figure approached. And then it was given to me to gaze upon Her Highness the Shereefa of Wazan. She was not called Zuleika, but Emily—her maiden name had been Keene, and she came not from the rose-bordered bowers of Bendemeer's stream, nightingale-haunted, but from the prosaic levels of South London, where her father was governor of a gaol. Truly she was a vision of gratefulness in that paynim tract—a rich brunette, with large black eyes, long black ringletted tresses, and a well-filled shape with goodly bust. Her attire was neat and graceful and not Oriental. She was clad in a riding-habit of ruby brocaded velvet, with jacket to match, had a cloud of lace round her throat, and an Alpine hat with cock's feather poised on her well-set head. She might serve as the model for a Spanish Ann Chute. Bracelets on her plump wrists and rings on her taper fingers caught the sunshine as she occasionally twirled her cutting-whip. Her voice was bell-like and melodious, with the faintest accent of decision, and her manner, after an opening flush of embarrassment, was cordial and debonair. The embarrassment was because of her inability to extend to us the hospitality she desired. She explained that she had to receive us in the garden as the house was undergoing repairs. After the customary commonplaces, she freely entered into conversation, and took opportunity at once to deny that she was a renegade; she wore European costume, as we saw, and attended the rites of the English Church, for it was one of the stipulations of the marriage contract that she should have perfect liberty to follow her own faith.

"I wish every English girl were as happily married as I," she said, "and had as loving a husband."

It was gratifying, therefore, to note that she found herself as women wish to be who love their lords. She had been married on the 27th of January, and as the Shereef had entered into his present residence but recently, they were still at sixes and sevens. It was his habit to spend the winter in the country and the summer in town. She had been but two years in Morocco, and had not yet mastered Arabic.

"His Highness understands English?" She shook her head, and quickly interpreting a lifting of my eyelids, she smilingly added, "Spanish was the medium of our courtship." And then, as we promenaded the garden path, she became communicative, and dwelt with pardonable expansion on the virtues of her lord and master, who followed behind side by side with the portly Yorkshireman. His charity, she said, was unbounded. Slaves were frequently sent to him as presents, but he kept none. He was modest on his own merits, and yet he was the most enlightened of Moors. He had visited Marseilles, a war-ship having been put at his disposal by the French Government, and was most anxious to take a tour to Paris and Vienna, and above all to England. It was his desire that railways should be constructed in Morocco, and he was glad when he was told that there was some likelihood of a telegraph cable being laid to Tangier.

"Then," interrupted I, "with your Highness's influence on the tribes around, exercised through your husband, there should be a fair prospect of pushing civilization here."

"Ah, yes!" she exclaimed, with a glow on her cheeks, "that is one of my dearest hopes, that is my great ambition. I believe that my marriage, which has been cruelly commented upon in England, may effect good both for these poor misunderstood Moors and my own country people."

"Is the Shereef on friendly terms with the Sultan?"

"No, I am sorry to say there is a feud between them at the moment. The Sultan objects to my husband for using an English saddle."

"Hum!" (to myself mentally) "if the august Muley cannot brook an English saddle, what must he think of an English wife? Or do these Moslems, like some Christians I know, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? Mayhap it is even so. The pigeon-prompted camel-driver, who built up his creed with plentiful blood-cement, saw fit to add a new chapter to the Koran, when he fell in love with the Coptic maiden, Mary."

The Shereefa told me that her father and mother had come out to see her. They were averse to the alliance at first, but were satisfied that she had done the right thing when she told them how content she was, and with what high-bred consideration for her wishes in the matter of religion her husband had behaved. Their intention was to stop for four days, but they extended their visit to fourteen. "And now," she continued, "I can use to my lord the words of Ruth to Naomi, 'Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people'"—a pause—"yes, and 'thy God my God,' for there is but one"—archly—"the matter of the Prophet we shall leave aside."

I admired the lady's pluck, and if I were that Moorish squire I have tried to sketch, I should esteem it an honour to have her on my visiting list. But I am a theological oddity, and my wallet of prejudices, it is to be feared, is sadly unfurnished. I never could rise to that sublimated self-sufficiency of intellect that I could consign any fellow-creature to everlasting pains for the audacity of differing in dogma with myself. I have met good and bad of every creed, Mahometans I could respect—whose word was their bond—and so-called Christians and Christian ministers with a most uncharitable spiritual pride, whom I could not respect. The liver of the persecutor was denied me. Were the fires of Smithfield to be rekindled, my prayers would be sent up for the floods of Heaven to quench them, and for the lightnings of Heaven to annihilate the fiends who had piled the faggots.

"By-the-bye," said the Shereefa, "do you know any of those people who write for the papers in London?"

I admitted that I had that misfortune.

"Some of them are fools as well as cowards," she went on. "They have written articles about me full of ignorance and malice. Have they no consideration for the feelings of others?"

"I am afraid, your Highness, some of them are more brilliant than conscientious; they would rather point an epigram than sacrifice style to truth or good-nature."

"One of them in particular," she said, and there was an irritated ring in her voice, "has singled me out for attack, and given me in derision a name which he believes to be Mahometan, but which is really Jewish."

And with her cutting-whip she viciously snapped off the heads of some poppies. The episode of Tarquin's answer to the emissary of Sextus occurred to me, and I felt that if my colleague, Horace St. J——, were there, he would have passed a very bad quarter of an hour.

The females of our party joined us, and I formally presented them, taking a malicious pleasure in emphasizing the "your Highness." The Shereefa received them right graciously, but it was easy to notice that a chill came over the conversation. They were careful never to use the title to their English sister. In fact, it was a tacit ladies' battle.

It was time to leave, and the Shereefa presented her visitors with two nosegays, gathered by her own hands. The act had in it something very royal, with the smallest trace of sly condescension. The Shereef accompanied us to the outer gate. On the way I motioned to Captain No. 1 to offer him a cigar. He did; his Highness accepted it, bowed, and gravely put it in his pocket. As we stood on the road at parting, a peasant was passing with a load of twigs on his shoulders. He cast them off, threw himself on his knees, kissed the hem of the holy man's garments, and the back of his proffered hand.

We were descending the hill when a rustle in the bushes attracted me, and a white face peeped out and a voice besought me in English to stop. It was the Shereefa's London lady's-maid. She could not resist the temptation of enjoying a few sentences with one of her own race. From her I learned that there were twenty-seven Moorish women in her master's household; that there was a tank at Wazan large enough to float a ship; that her master had been married before, and had two sons and a lovely Mahometan child, a daughter, to whom the Shereefa was teaching English and the piano; "but remember, please," and here she grew important, and had all the dignity of a retainer, with a great sense of what was due to her caste and the proprieties, "that my mistress's children, if she have any, will be Europeans!"

As we got back to our hotel the muezzins were summoning the faithful to their vesper orisons, and Albert was moaning ruefully under the sideboard. Mrs. Captain had out her sweetly pretty pet at once, and covered him with caresses and endearments.

"Somebody has given him something that has disagreed with him. Was it you?" she said to me, and there was that in her tone which made me quake in my shoes.

Meekly and truthfully I protested that I had not; I had fed him in the morning in her own presence; the darling was in his usual health and spirits when we left, but—intercede for me, Puck, and you aerial imps of mischief, for no other spirit will—I could not help murmuring in audible soliloquy, "The carcase of that mongoose, which was on the square outside this morning, is no longer there."

The scene that followed, to borrow the hackneyed phrase, beggars description. The house was turned upside down; to my mental vision arose sal volatile and burnt feathers, swoons and hysterics. Mahomet's dove alone can tell how all might have ended had not the Frenchman suggested a bolus. Captain No. 1 and I were commissioned to inquire into the mystery of the disappearance of that baleful mongoose. When we got out of earshot of the hotel there was the popping of a cork, and we emptied effervescing beakers to the speedy recovery of Albert the Beloved. Certes, that bull-dog had a very bad fit of dyspepsia; but the bolus did him a world of good, and before we retired to rest we had the felicity to hear him crunching a bone. Peace spread its wings over our pillows.

The next day we took a trip to the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, the women labouring in the field making curious inspection of the cavalcade as it wended by, but quickly turning away their faces as we males tried to snatch a look at them. The road was no better than a rugged track on a stony plateau. There was a spacious view from the Phare, which was an iron and stone building put up at the cost of three or four of the European Powers (I forget which now), the keepers being chosen from each of the contributory nations. The Sultan had given the site, but refused to hand over a blankeel towards the expenses, arguing that as he had no fleet, he had no personal object in making provision against wrecks. We were well mounted, but these Barbary cattle have a nasty trick of lashing out, so that it is prudent to give a wide range to their hind-hoofs. Mahomet, riding with very short stirrups, led the party. My saddle was an ancient, rude, and rotten contrivance, and as I loitered on the road home, giving myself up to idle fantasy, my friends got on far ahead. Waking from my day-dream I gave the nag the heel, and as it sprang forward at a canter the girth turned completely round, and I was pitched over in unpleasant nearness to a hedge of cactus. The ground was soft, and I was not much bruised; but when I rose the nag had disappeared round a corner, and I was left alone in the African twilight. Presently a sinewy fiery-eyed Moor came with panther-step in sight leading me back the nag. He had a basket of oranges on his back, and gave me one with a respectful salaam as I vaulted on my Arab steed and galloped Tangier-ward bareback.

Judging from the scanty rags upon him, this man was of the poorest, yet he asked for nothing; there were sympathy, innate politeness and independence withal in his bearing. To him I abandoned the saddle; it was the least he might have for his friendly act. Talking over this incident with the Frenchman at Bruzeaud's, who knew the country, he told me that the Moor was intelligent, honest, faithful to his engagements, and had a go in him that, under advantageous circumstances, would enable him to spring again to his former height of power and riches. But he struck me as happy, although some of his social customs recalled the feudal age, and he lived under the always-present contingency of decapitation. May it be long before speculation rears the horrid front of a joint-stock hotel in Tangier, or the prospectors go divining for copper, coal, iron, silver and gold. I could wish the Moorish women, however, would wash their children's heads occasionally, and not take them up by the ankles when they spank them. After a sojourn in every way pleasurable—pshaw! Albert's illness was a trifle, and we soon resigned ourselves to the miseries of the prisoners on the hill—we ate our last morsel of the Jewish pasch-bread of flour and juice of orange, cracked our last bottle of champagne, and took our leave of the Dark Continent with lightsome heart. The impression this little by-journey left upon me was so agreeable that I could not avoid the enticement to communicate it to the reader. If I have wandered from romantic Spain, it was only to take him to a land more romantic still.

CHAPTER VII.

Back to Gibraltar—The Parting with Albert—The Tongue of Scandal—Voyage to Malaga—"No Police, no Anything"—Federalism Triumphant—Madrid in Statu Quo—Orense—Progress of the Royalists—On the Road Home—In the Insurgent Country—Stopped by the Carlists—An Angry Passenger is Silenced.

"How like a boulder tossed by Titans at play!" said the sentimental lady, as we approached Gibraltar on our return.

"More like a big-sized molar tooth," broke in Mrs. Captain.

And, indeed, this latter simile, if less poetic, gave a better idea of the conformation of the fortified hill, with the gum-coloured outline of all that was left of a Moorish wall skirting its side. The tooth is hollow, but the hollow is plugged with the best Woolwich stuffing, and potentially it can bite and grind and macerate, for all the peaceful gardens and frescades of the Alameda that circle its base like a belt of faded embroidery. At Gibraltar our party separated, the Yorkshire Captain and his friends taking the P. and O. boat to Southampton, my countryman going back to Tangier after having made some purchases, and I electing to voyage to Malaga by one of Hall's packets, which was lying at the mercantile Mole discharging the two hundred tons of Government material which it is obliged to carry by contract on each fortnightly voyage. When Albert and I parted no tears were shed; we resigned ourselves to the decree of destiny with equanimity. But I humbly submit that Mrs. Captain, when thanking me for my good intentions towards him, might have spared me the ironical advice not to volunteer for duties in future which I was not qualified to fulfil. "Volunteer," ye gods! when she had absolutely entreated me to take him in charge.

Before leaving the Club-House, I was pressed to relate our adventures in Africa. I had no pig-sticking exploits to make boast over; but I turned the deaf side of my head to certain whispers about holy men who imported wine in casks labelled "Petroleum," who affected to be delivering the incoherent messages of inspiration when they were merely trying to pronounce "The scenery is truly rural" in choice Arabic, and who accounted for the black eye contracted by collision with the kerb by a highly-coloured narrative of an engagement in mid-air with an emissary of Sheitan. Neither did I accord any pleased attention to anecdotes of a "lella," or Arab lady, who tempted the Scorpions to charge ten times its value for everything she bought by telling them to send them to a personage whose title was exalted. Gib is a very small place, and, like most diminutive communities, is a veritable school for scandal. I took my last walk over the Rock, past the "Esmeralda Confectionery," which still had up the notice that hot-cross buns were to be had from seven to ten a.m. on Good Friday, and paced to the light-house on the nose of the promontory, where the meteor flag, ringed by a bracelet of cannon, flies in the breeze. And then I meandered back, and began to ask myself, had Marryat aught to do with the sponsorship of this outpost of the British Empire? Shingle Point, Blackstrap Bay, the Devil's Tower, O'Hara's Folly, Bayside Barrier, and Jumper's Bastion—the names were all redolent of the Portsmouth Hard; and I almost anticipated a familiar hail at every moment from the open door of "The Nut," and an inquiry as to what cheer from the fog-Babylon.

The trip to Malaga on one of the Hall steamers which trade regularly between London and that port, calling at Cadiz and Gibraltar, was very agreeable, and the change to such dietary as liver and bacon was a treat. We were but three passengers—a steeple-chasing sub of the 71st, Señor Heredia, of Malaga, and myself. And now I have to make an open confession. I am unable to decipher the log of that passage. I have a distinct recollection of the liver and bacon, but more important events have worn away from my mind. There are the traces of pencil-marks before me; I dare say they were full of meaning when I scrawled them down, but now I have lost the key. "Jolly captain—left his wife—forty years—electric light deceives on a low beach—fourteen children—El Cano—break in the head of wine-casks": there is a literal copy of the contents of a page, which may mean nothing or anything, frivolity or a thesaurus of serious information. Memory, what a treacherous jade thou art! It may be said, why did I not take copious notes in short-hand? I would have done so were I a stenographer; but I am not. I tried to acquire the accomplishment once, and ignobly failed. I could write short-hand slightly quicker than long-hand, but when written, I could not transcribe my jottings.

Flanking a beautiful coast, mostly hill-fringed—with hills, too, of such metallic richness that lead and iron were positively to be quarried out of their bosoms—we steamed into the harbour of Malaga, and landed at the Custom-House quay. But there were no Customs' officers to trouble us with inquiry. A red-bearded, flat-capped, dirty fellow in bare feet, holding a bayoneted rifle with a jaunty clumsiness, accosted Señor Heredia with a laughing voice. He was a sentinel of the provisional government established in Malaga. The nature of that government may be judged from his frank avowal: "We've no police—no anything." There were French and German war-vessels at anchor, which was some guarantee of protection for strangers. A novel tricolour of red, white, and a washed-out purple had replaced the national flag. The Federal Republic existed there, and yet the city was quiet; and official bulletins were extant, recommending the citizens to preserve order. But this quietude was not to be relied on over-much. One of the magnificoes under the new régime was a dancing-house keeper, and his principal claim to administrative ability lay in the ownership of a Phrygian cap. Another, who styled himself President of the Republic of Alhaurin de la Torre, a territory more limited than the kingdom of Kippen, had stabbed a lady at a masked ball a few months previously, for a consideration of sixty-five duros. Still, it would be unfair to infer from that example that every Malagueño was a mercenary ruffian, Señor Heredia related to me an anecdote of a poor man who had found a purse with value in it to the amount of thirty thousand reals, and had given it up without mention of recompense. But a city where the wine-shops had nine doors, and potato-gin was dispensed at a peseta the bottle, and there were "no police—no anything," was not a desirable residence; and, as I had no call there, and weeks might elapse before another revolution might be sprung, I gladly took train to the capital.

Madrid was tranquil, but with no more confidence in the duration of tranquillity than when I left it. The army was still in a state akin to disruption, with this difference—the rascals who had rifled the pockets of the dead Ibarreta a few weeks before, would sell the bodies of their slain officers now, if there was any resurrectionist near to make a bid. Worse; I was given to understand that there were suspicions that the gallant staff-colonel had been shot by his own men. The dismissed gunners were still wearily beating the pavements, and a subscription organized on their behalf among the officers of the other branches of the service by the Correo Militar was open. What were these gentlemen to do? There was a rumour that they had been invited to enter the French service, to which they would have been an undoubted acquisition, bringing with them skill, scientific knowledge, and experience. But they were Spaniards, not soldiers of fortune, and would decline to transfer their allegiance, even if France were disposed to bid for it. Still, what were they to do? In Spain as in Austria—

"Le militaire n'est pas riche,
Chacun salt ça."

But the militaire must live. Othello's occupation being gone, the artillery officers had no alternative but to do what Othello would have done had he been a Spaniard—conspire.

The usual manœuvring and manipulations were going on as preparation for the election of the Constituent Cortes, and the extreme Republicans were full of faith in their approaching triumph all along the line. They were awaiting Señor Orense, but if he did not hasten it was thought events so important would eclipse his arrival that, when he did come, the Madrileños would pay as small heed to him as the Parisians did to Hugo when he surveyed the boulevards anew after years of exile. They would honour him with a procession, and no more. The venerable Republican, by the way, is a nobleman, Marquis of Albaida. But he is not equal to the democratic pride of Mirabeau, marquis, who took a shop and painted on the signboard, "Mirabeau, marchand de draps."

"If you are a true Republican, why don't you renounce your title?" somebody asked once of Orense.

"If it were only myself was concerned I would willingly," responded the Spaniard; "but I have a son!" Rousseau was a freethinker, but Rousseau had his daughters baptized all the same.

Meanwhile the Carlists were making headway. The Vascongadas, Navarre, and Logroño, with the exception of the larger towns and isolated fortified posts, were now in their power. Antonio Dorregaray, who was in supreme command, was reported to have 3,200 men regularly organized, well clad, and equipped with Remingtons. The Remington had been selected so that the Royalists might be able to use the ammunition they reckoned upon helping themselves with from the pouches of the Nationalists. In addition to this force of 3,200, which might be regarded as the regular army of Carlism, there were formidable guerrilla bands scattered over the provinces. Our old acquaintance, Santa Cruz, had 900 followers in Guipúzcoa. The other cabecillas in that region were Francisco, Macazaga, Garmendia, Iturbe, and Culetrina, all men with local popularity and intimate knowledge of the mountains. In Biscay, the commander was Valesco, and his lieutenants were Belaustegui, del Campo, and the Marquis de Valdespina, son of the chieftain who raised the standard of revolution at Vitoria in 1833. Their factions were estimated at 2,500. After Dorregaray, the most dangerous opponent to the Government troops was Ollo, an old ex-army officer, who was licking the volunteers into shape; and after Santa Cruz, the most noted and dreaded chief of irregulars was Rada, who was also operating in "the kingdom," as their province is proudly called by the daring Navarrese. The elements in which the Royalists were wanting were cavalry and artillery; but they had some money, foreign friends were active, the French frontier was not too strictly watched nor the Cantabrian coast inaccessible, and Don Carlos—Pretender or King, as the reader chooses to call him—was biding his time in a villa not a hundred miles from Bayonne. When the hour was considered favourable, he was ready to cross the border and take the field, or rather the hills; and his presence, it was calculated, would be worth a corps d'armée in the fillip it would give to the enthusiasm of his adherents.

And yet the "only court" held its tertulias, and the doñas talked millinery, and bald politicians sighed for a snug post in the Philippines, and the gambling-tables and the bull-ring retained their spell upon the community. It was the old story: Rome was on the verge of ruin, and the senate of Tiberius discussed a new sauce for turbot.

As I saw no immediate prospect of the outburst of those important events, which were cloud-gathering over Madrid, and nearly all my colleagues had departed, I resolved to pursue my journey to London. I had carte blanche to return when I deemed there was no further scope for my pen; but there was an obstacle in the way. Miranda was the terminus of the rail to the north; the track thence to the Bidassoa had been closed by order of the lieutenants of his Majesty in nubibus, King Charles VII. In other words, 179 kilometres of the main iron line, the great artery of communication with France, were held by the insurgents. Obstacles are made to be met, and, if steadily met, to be overcome. Surely, I reasoned, there must be some intercourse carried on in these districts. I passed through territory occupied by Carlists before. Why not again? Besides, I had nothing to fear from the Carlists, the tramp carols in the presence of the footpad (which, I submit, is a neat paraphrase of a classic saw); and if I did chance to meet them, there would be that dear touch of romance for which the lady-reader has been looking out so long in vain.

I started. The journey to Miranda I pass by. One is not qualified to write an essay on a country from inspection through the windows of a railway-carriage in motion, more particularly at night. As well attempt to describe a veiled panorama, unrolling itself at a hand-gallop. At Miranda, which was crowded with soldiers, there was a diligence that plied to San Sebastian by tacit arrangement with the knights of the road—that is, the adherents of Don Carlos. As the fares were very expensive, I suspect the speculator who ran the coach was heavily taxed for the privilege, and recouped himself by shifting the imposition to the shoulders of passengers. The day was fine, the roads were good, the vehicle was well-horsed, and we got away from the boundary of republican civilization at a rattling pace. My fellow-voyagers were mostly French, some of them of the gentle sex, and chattered like pies until they fell asleep. I believe it is admitted by those who know me best that I can do my own share of sleep. On the slightest provocation—yea, on what might be condemned as no reasonable provocation—I can drop my head upon my breast and go off into oblivion. Nor am I particular where I sit or if I sit at all. Any ordinary person can fall asleep on a sofa or at a sermon, but it requires a practitioner with an inborn faculty for the art to achieve the triumphs of somnolence which stand to my credit. I have taken a nap on horseback; I have marched for miles, a musket on my shoulder, in complete slumberous unconsciousness; I have nodded while Phelps was acting, snoozed while Mario was singing, and played the marmot while Remenyi was fiddling; awful confession, I have dozed through an important debate in the House of Commons! I am yawning at present. It is to be hoped the reader is not. And so I burned daylight the while we drove through a country reputed to be pregnant with surprises of scenery until, at long last, the diligence drew up in the straggling street of Tolosa. We halted here for dinner, and resumed our journey with a fresh team at an enlivening speed, until about two miles outside the town we came to an abrupt stop.

"An accident, driver?"

"No, señor, but the Carlists."

Some of my fellow-passengers turned pale, the ladies did not know whether to scream or consult their smelling-bottles; and before they could decide, a tall, slight, gentlemanly-looking man of some four-and-twenty years, with a sword by his side, a revolver in his belt, an opera-glass slung across his shoulder, and a silver tassel depending from a scarlet boina, the cap of the country, appeared at the hinder door of the diligence, bowed, and asked for our papers. He glanced at them much as a railway-guard would at a set of tickets, inquired if we were carrying any arms or contraband despatches, and being answered in the negative, gave us a polite "Go you with God," and motioned to the driver that he might pass on. As we galloped off, all eyes were turned in the direction of the stranger; he leisurely walked over a field towards a hill, two peasants equipped with rifles and side-arms following at his heels. They were young and strong, and wore no nearer approach to uniform than their officer.

"This is abominable," cried a French commercial traveller (so I took him to be), as soon as we had got out of hearing of the trio. "The notion of these three miscreants stopping a whole coachful of travellers in broad daylight is atrocious!"

"They did not detain us long," said I.

"They did us no harm," said another.

"And that officer, I am sure, was very polite, and looked quite a D'Artagnan—so chivalrous and handsome," added one of the ladies.

"They are no better than bandits," said the commercial traveller. "Driver, why did you not resist?"

For reply, the driver pointed with his whip to a wall, under the lee of which a party of at least fifty armed men, portion of the main body from which the outpost of three had been detached, were smoking, chatting, or sleeping. The commercial traveller relapsed into silence. We met with no further adventure in our ride to the frontier, but experienced much fatigue.

CHAPTER VIII.

On the Wing—Ordered to the Carlist Headquarters—Another Petit Paris—Carlists from Cork—How Leader was Wounded—Beating-up for an Anglo-Irish Legion—Pontifical Zouaves—A Bad Lot—Oddities of Carlism—Santa Cruz Again—Running a Cargo—On Board a Carlist Privateer—A Descendant of Kings—"Oh, for an Armstrong Twenty-Four Pounder!"—Crossing the Border—A Remarkable Guide—Mountain Scenery—In Navarre—Challenged at Vera—Our Billet with the Parish Priest—The Sad Story of an Irish Volunteer—Dialogue with Don Carlos—The Happy Valley—Bugle-Blasts—The Writer in a Quandary—The Fifth Battalion of Navarre—The Distribution of Arms—The Bleeding Heart—Enthusiasm of the Chicos.

After a short stay in London I was despatched to Stockholm, to attend the coronation of Oscar II of Sweden and his spouse, which took place in the Storkyrkan, on the 12th of May. At the Hotel Rydberg I met my Madrid acquaintance, Mr. Russell Young, who was a bird of passage like myself, and had just arrived from Vienna, where he had been detailing the ceremonial at the opening of the International Exhibition in the Prater. While enjoying myself at a ball at the Norwegian Minister's, I received a telegraphic message, ordering me at once to the Austrian capital. I was very sorry to leave, for I was delighted with peaceful airy Stockholm and the free-hearted Swedes—it was such a change after Spain; but I had neither license nor leisure to grumble, and flitted to Vienna as fast as steam could carry me. The Weltausstellung did not prove to be a lodestone, although in justice it must be admitted it was one of the finest shows ever planned, and was fixed in one of the most agreeable of sites. It was too far away, however, to attract the British public, and there were rumours of cholera lurking in the Kaiserstadt; so I was recalled, but to be sent to Spain once more. My mission was to penetrate, if possible, to the headquarters of the Carlists, with the view of giving a fair and full report of the strength, peculiarities, and prospects of their movement.

At the London office of the sympathizers with the cause I was furnished with the address of certain Carlists in confidential positions in France, and letters were sent on in advance, so as to secure me a favourable reception. Armed with a sheet of flimsy stamped in blue with the escutcheon of Charles VII., and the legend "Secretaria Militar de Lóndres," and with, what was more potent, a big credit on a banking-house, I started afresh on the now familiar route.

Before undertaking the journey into the territory in revolt I halted at Bayonne to procure the necessary passes. These were obtained with ease from the Junta sitting in the Rue des Ecoles, the members of which professed that they desired nothing so much as the presence of the representatives of impartial foreign journals, so that the truth about the struggle should be made known to the rest of Europe. From Bayonne I proceeded to Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction, and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten nook. A petit Paris it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the kind, but something infinitely better. The breezes from the main and the mountains, from the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, conspire to supply it with ozone. There is music in the boom of the surf as it pulsates regularly on the velvet sands of a semicircular inlet, where dogs frisk and youngsters gambol in the sunshine.

In a hotel on the edge of that inlet, the Fonda de la Playa, where I put up, a young Irish gentleman named Leader was recuperating from a severe wound in the leg. He had received it in the service of Don Carlos, in a skirmish near Azpeitia, where he was the only man hit. He was out with a party of the guerrilleros, and came across a company of the Madrid troops. To encourage his own people, or rather the people with whom he had cast in his fortunes, he went well to the front, and mounting on a bank of earth, hurled defiance at the enemy. He was picked down by a stray shot, and if he had been taken prisoner it is probable that he would have paid for his temerity with his life. The Spaniards were not clement towards foreigners who interposed in their domestic quarrel. Leader was carried off by his companions and secreted in a peasant's hut. The troops, swearing vengeance, searched the hut next to it, but, by some accident, failed to continue the quest to the refuge of the wounded man. He bled profusely, but the hæmorrhage was finally arrested by some rude bandaging, and at night he was helped astride a donkey, and conveyed across the frontier into France. He told me he had suffered excruciating torments at every jolt of the jog-trotting animal on that mountain journey. Had the bullet struck him an inch higher he would have had to suffer amputation; but his luck stood to him, and at the time we met he was getting on fairly towards recovery, thanks to youth, a good constitution, and the healthy air of St. Jean de Luz. I could not understand the ardour of Leader's partisanship for the Carlists. He spoke the merest smattering of Spanish, and had no profound intimacy with the vexed question of Spanish politics or the rights of the rival Spanish houses. The ill-natured whispered that he was crying "Viva la República" when he was knocked over. It is possible, for he had fought for the French Republic with Bourbaki's army, and may, in his excitement, have forgotten under what flag he was serving. I take it he was a soldier by instinct, and ranged himself on the side of Don Carlos more from the love of adventure than from any other motive. He was a fine athletic young fellow, with a handsome determined cast of features. He had been an ensign in the 30th Foot, and had resigned his commission to enjoy a spell of active service when the Franco-German war was proclaimed. That he had behaved bravely in the campaign which led to internment in Switzerland was evidenced by the ribbon of the Legion of Honour which he wore. Leader was very anxious that an Anglo-Irish legion in aid of Don Carlos should be organized. I felt it my duty to warn those to whom he appealed to think twice before they embarked on such a crusade. He was very wroth with me for having thrown cold water on the project, but that did not affect me. I had more experience of such follies than he, and my conscience approved me. A man may be justified in playing with his own life, but he should be slow in playing with the lives of others. He prepares a vexing responsibility for himself if he is sensitive.

In the next room to Leader was a fellow-enthusiast, Mr. Smith Sheehan, an ex-officer of Pontifical Zouaves, and son of a popular and eccentric town-councillor of Cork. He was an agile stripling, skilled in all gymnastic exercises. He had also done some fighting with the Carlists, and was in France on furlough, which the soldiers in the Royalist force appeared to have no insuperable difficulty in getting. He told me there was a large infusion of his old regiment amongst the guerrilleros, and that they helped to bind the partisan levies in the withes of discipline. Most of them had smelt gunpowder at Mentana and Patay. The famous cabecilla, Saballs, had been a captain at Rome, and Captain Wills, a Dutchman, who had been killed in a brush at Igualada, had been sergeant-major in Sheehan's company.

There was another ex-British officer of short service, who had a remarkably imposing and well-cultivated growth of moustache. He was a violent doctrinaire Carlist, but suffered from a chronic malady which prevented him from taking the field; still there was none who could plot with a more tremendous air of mystery. He was a Carlist because it was "the correct thing" to be one in the fashionable ring at St. Jean de Luz, where he had settled, and because he inherited a name associated with chivalric insurrection. For the sake of his family I shall call him Barbarossa. He was no honour to his house, for he was an inveterate gambler, and was not careful in discharging the obligations he wantonly contracted. He is dead. His death was no loss to society. In fact, if the whole host of gamblers, lock, stock and barrel, were swept by a fairy-blast to the regions of thick-ribbed ice, the world would be the gainer.

When I left Spain, Carlism was to be put down in a fortnight—in Madrid. Now it threatened to last as long as a Chinese play. The Royalists—I suppose they had earned the title to be so named by their perseverance—had achieved numerous small successes which had raised their morale, and they were being supplied with arms of precision from abroad, and trained to their use. They had even taken some mountain-guns from their enemy. Leader made me laugh with his accounts of Lizarraga shouting "Artillería al frente!" and a couple of mules, with one wretched little piece, moving forward; and of the intimidating clatter made by three shrunk cavaliers in cuirasses a world too wide for them, and alpargatas, trotting up a village street. The alpargata is the mountain-shoe of canvas, with a hempen sole, worn by the Basque peasants. The association of surcoats of mail and rope slippers is incongruous; but what does that reck? Those cuirasses were spolia opima.

And Santa Cruz?

The honest gentleman had retired into private life. His excesses had raised such a storm of opprobrium against the Carlists that they had to request him to desist. Lizarraga summoned him to render himself up a prisoner. "Come and take me," replied Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had near two thousand followers; Lizarraga a few hundred. Lizarraga declined the invitation. But the priest caused seven-and-twenty Carabineros, taken prisoners at the bridge of Endarlasa, near Irun, to be shot, and this filled the cup to overflowing. The Carlists averred they would slay him; the Republicans vowed they would garrote him for a Madrid holiday; the French Government declared its intention of putting him under lock and key if it caught him within its jurisdiction. His band was disarmed "by order of the King," and dispersed, and the Cura himself nebulously vanished—whither we may see anon.

There was a large accretion to the population of St. Jean de Luz in Iberian refugees, and as they sat and conversed under the foliage of the public promenade, frequent sighs might be overheard, and remarks that if this sort of thing were to go on, "Spain would soon be in as bad a condition as France." At all hours there came to the beach poor exiles of Spain, who turned their eyes sadly to the line where sky met ocean. Of what were their thoughts—of home and friends, of the flutters of the casino or the ecstasies of the bull-ring? If they were looking for the Spanish fleet they did not see it, for a reason as old as the "Critic." It was not in sight. They came down in numbers in front of my hotel at nine o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 28th, a few days after my arrival, when a strange yellow funnel turned the point, and a long low Red-Roverish three-masted schooner-yacht steamed into Socoa, the roadstead of St. Jean de Luz. If the exiles were correctly informed, that was the Spanish fleet in a sense—the notorious Carlist privateer, the San Margarita, which had recently landed arms and ammunition for the Royalists at Lequeieto and elsewhere. She had been doing a stroke of business in the same line that morning. In the grey dawn she had dropped into the embouchure of the Bidassoa, at a few hundred yards from the town of Fontarabia. The work was well and quickly done. Boats requisitioned by friends on land put off to her, and returned laden with bales of merchandise. These artless bales were packages of breechloaders, with bayonets to match, wrapped in sail-cloth. As soon as they were received on shore they were distributed amongst some thousands of Carlists in waiting, who at once proceeded to fix bayonets, fall into ranks, and with shouts of exultation march off in good order.

Meanwhile, the "volunteers of liberty," as the Basque Republicans called themselves, ensconced their persons out of range in a sort of castle beside the church of Fontarabia's "wooded height," and amused themselves taking pot-shots at the rising sun. But they did not venture from their shelter; they knew a large body of armed Royalists were watching their movements from the summit of Cape Higuer, and only awaited the provoke to pounce down upon and swallow them. A detachment of Frenchmen from the frontier hamlet of Hendaye quietly took up ground on the strand to see that there was no breach of neutrality, and had an uninterrupted view of the whole operation. As soon as the daring little privateer had done her work she innocently steamed to Socoa; the Carlists on the hills waved adieu and disappeared; the French soldiers returned to their quarters; and the Fontarabian "volunteers of liberty "—well, most probably they swore terribly, and effected a masterly retrograde movement on the nearest posada.

I had a call to board the San Margarita. Not a boat could be had in St. Jean de Luz for love or money; the passage from the sea into the harbour is narrow, and the fishermen, though hardy navigators, are shy of facing the current when the sea is rough. Leader and myself walked by the goat-path on the crags leading to the southern side of the harbour so as to avoid the bar, and succeeded in chartering a skiff at Socoa. A quarter of an hour's pull brought us alongside the yacht, and on sending up our cards we were at once invited on board by the owner. To my surprise I discovered that the entire crew was British, as reckless a set of dare-devils as ever cut out a craft from under an enemy's guns. The skipper, Mr. Travers, was a Cork man, an ex-officer of the Indian Navy, who had lost a finger during the Mutiny; but the life and soul of the enterprise was an ex-officer of the Austrian and Mexican armies, Charles-Edward Stuart, Count d'Albanie, great-grandson of "the Young Pretender." His uncle, John Sobieski Stuart, had resigned his claim to the throne of England on his behalf,[C] so that I actually shook the hand of the man who under other circumstances might be wielding the sceptre of that empire on which the sun never sets. Instead of a crown he wore the genuine old Highland bonnet—not that modern innovation, the military feather-bonnet. In face this descendant of royalty was an unmistakable Stuart, with the characteristic aquiline nose, and a proud dignity of expression. He might have sat for the portrait of Charles the Martyr-King, by Vandyck, in Windsor. He was a convinced and earnest supporter of the claims of Cárlos Séptimo, whom he regarded as a cousin, and a sort of modern counterpart of the young Chevalier, the "darling Charlie" of Jacobite minstrelsy. He received us with the hospitality of his nation, and we had a long chat as we paced the deck briskly, the Count discussing the prospects of the rising, and then verging off into gay anecdotes of his military career in Austria, and inquiries after mutual acquaintances in London. By-and-by Captain Travers made his appearance, a tall weather-beaten navigator in orthodox naval dress, with a glass in his eye. He bowed severely to the Stuart, who as coldly returned his salute. It was easy to perceive that there was a restraint in the demeanour of the men on both sides; but there was a tacit armistice for the occasion. I heard afterwards that they did not talk to each other, except on strict matters of duty, and when taking their short walks on deck, one confined himself religiously to the larboard, the other to the starboard. Travers took me in tow, while the alert Count with his quick manner strode to and fro with Leader, and kept up a jerky fire of conversation nearly all to himself, occasionally twirling his peaked beard. Travers and I lolled over the bulwarks, and laughed and sampled the contents of an aqua-vitæ bottle, "Special Jury" whisky from Ireland, and I learned that this ill-assorted pair had been sharing some close hazards on their audacious cruiser.

A few days previously they had been chased by El Aspirante, a Spanish gun-boat, which gave them eight shots. One caught them on the port quarter, and shivered some timbers, but effected no more serious damage.

"I wish we had only an Armstrong twenty-four pounder close handy," said the mate, "and we'd have saved them 'ere dons the price of a coffin, I'd take my davy!"

From what I saw of the seamen, I think this was no empty boast. Some of them had served with one Captain Semmes on a certain craft called the Alabama, and had been picked up after the fight with the Keasarge, off Cherbourg, by Mr. John Lancaster's yacht, the Deerhound. There is no need for concealment now, so that I may freely admit that the Deerhound and the San Margarita were one and the same. Travers, who was in love with the yacht, told me if he had another blade to the screw he could give leg-bail to the fastest ship in the Spanish navy. At leaving, I was asked to take a trip with them; they were about to visit their floating arsenal in the Bay of Biscay, load, and try to run another cargo. I respectfully declined—fortunately for myself; my orders were to get to the Carlist headquarters, not to go playing Paul Jones.

Leader and Smith Sheehan were about to cross the border, and readily acceded to my request to form one of the party. We rose at daybreak next morning and looked out of window for the San Margarita. The roadstead of Socoa was a blank. She had steamed away during the night. After the customary chocolate we started blithely, in a light basket-carriage with a pair of fast-trotting ponies, that whisked us in less than two hours to the foot of the Pyrenees. Here we had to alight, the road up the mountain being impracticable for vehicles. A boy guide was in waiting to show us over the border by the smuggler's path—a wild short-cut through a labyrinth of brushwood. The guide was a remarkable youth in his way; he understood not a syllable of French or Spanish, and spoke only Basque which none of us comprehended, so that our parley with him was somewhat uninteresting. Yet I was anxious to elicit the opinions of that guide. A lad who could strike the path up the mountain with such truth might, by some instinct, have seen his way through Spanish politics. Our walk was a trial of endurance. I had traversed the Pyrenees in snow, and that was fatiguing enough in all conscience; but now the sun was beating cruelly on the parched herbage, and plodding up the ascent was like treading burning marl. I had to cry halt half-a-dozen times before we reached the summit; and yet that marvellous guide, with the baggage of all three on his head, kept on with a springy step and serene smile, like the youth in "Excelsior." It was an alternation of wheezing and stumbling with me, with a continuous ooze of perspiration, till I arrived heaving and panting on the crown of the ridge, and flung myself on the turf beside a pile of planking fresh from the woodcutter's axe. There was no further need to be wary, for this was Spain. We were over the border, and now my companions could breathe freely in every sense. Before they had passed the imaginary line they were liable to be arrested by the gendarmes, conducted back and interned, for they had that about their persons which betrayed that they were no innocent travellers. At every noise ahead, a scud was made to the cover of the tall ferns and brambles by the wayside, and an advance party of one was thrown out to reconnoitre. The precautions were superfluous, if we knew but all. From the 15th of July, the French patrols had got the hint to be blind. So lax was the cordon on the day we crossed, that a brigade of Carlists, each man with a repeating rifle on his shoulder and two revolvers in his belt, might have gone into Spain and never have had their sight offended by a solitary French uniform.

The view from the comb of the hills, as grasped on a sunny day, repays all the toil and trouble of the ascent; and looking round, one begins to realize the fascination of mountain-climbing. On one side extend the plains of France, washed by the greenish-blue waves of the Bay of Biscay, and studded as with pearls by the coast-towns of Fontarabia, St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz, Bayonne, and so on northwards till the vision fails. On the other side rise in convoluting swells the mountains of Navarre and Guipúzcoa, their slopes dyed in every shade of green from grass and lichen, shrub and tree, except where the naked rocks, bursting with ore, expose themselves. Iron, lead, silver, are all to be found in the bosom of the earth in this richest and most beautiful of lands. Nature has been lavish beyond measure, and man, instead of using her gifts, has ungratefully diverted them for generations to the purposes of guerrilla warfare and cheating the Custom-House officers. But this high moral tone hardly sits well on a man who was aiding and abetting the entry of a couple of foreign free-lances, on homicidal thoughts intent, and perhaps doing a stroke of contraband on his own account. We suffered no molestation; but others might not have escaped unpleasantness. The agent of a Hatton Garden jeweller might have had to pay toll, if the story were true that a few of the dispersed "Black Legion" had got off with their rifles and started a joint-stock company in the bush-whacking line, and were doing a pretty fair business.

The descent on the Spanish side was almost precipitous, and had to be effected with exceeding care. At times we ran down the track, rugged with sharp crags, almost head foremost, and only saved ourselves from falling by clinging to the nearest sapling. But there is an end to everything, and at last we came on the road that dips into the village of Echalar, in the district of Pampeluna, province of Navarre. Here we dismissed our guide, and here I encountered, for the first time, a regularly organized Carlist company, detached from the fifth battalion of Navarre, which was in garrison at Vera, some eight miles distant; but as I shall have opportunity to speak of the entire battalion soon, I defer comment on its appearance.

My companions were desirous of pushing forward, and the provisional alcalde of the village gave us a trap to take us on. There is an excellent road by the mountain-side, until a tunnel to the right is reached, when we entered a most picturesque, well-wooded defile, through which the Bidassoa pours its waters. We dashed along gaily until we came in sight of the steeple of the church of Vera at twilight.

A cry of "Who goes there?" from the gloom arrested us at the entrance of the town.

Leader sung out, "España."

Again came the sentinel's cry, "What people?" and cheerily ran the answer, "Voluntarios de Carlos Séptimo!"

"Pass," was the reply; and we took the street at a trot, and pulled up at the door of the parish priest's dwelling, where the Irish soldiers of fortune promised me a billet for the night. The kindly pastor was equal to expectations; we had a cordial welcome, a good dinner, and beds with clean sheets.

Sad tidings met my companions—those of the death of a young friend, Mr. John Scannel Taylor, a native of Cork, in the service of Don Carlos. A few months previously he had been a promising law student in the Queen's University of Ireland, with every prospect of a bright career before him. He arrived from England in the middle of June, and attached Himself to the partida of General Lizarraga in order to be near his fellow-countryman, Smith Sheehan. Previous to Mr. Sheehan's returning to Bayonne with despatches, he tossed up a coin to decide whether he or Taylor should have the choice of the duty. Poor Taylor won, and elected to remain with Lizarraga, as there was likelihood of fighting at hand. The very next day Yvero, where the Republicans held a strongly-intrenched position, was attacked, and the young Irish volunteer made himself conspicuous in the onset. While advancing in the open, setting a pattern of bravery to all by the steady way he delivered his fire, the gallant fellow was struck by a bullet in the leg. He kept on limping until he was touched a second time in the arm, but still he persevered with a dogged courage, when a third bullet struck him in the forehead, and he dropped with outspread arms, raising a little cloud of dust. He must have been stone-dead before he reached the ground. His conduct was "muy valiente," so said his Spanish comrades. He was picked up after the affair, and decently interred side by side with two officers who met their deaths in his company. This was the first time he was under fire, as it was the last; but there is a fatality in those things.

This young Irishman, Taylor, was luckier than some of his fellows in one respect. Short as he had been in the service, he had attracted the notice of Don Carlos. His comrade Sheehan and he were pointed out to "the King" by Lizarraga as two modest deserving young soldiers who had offered to fight in the ranks—a trait of unselfishness that must have astonished the Carlist leaders, as most of the volunteers they had from France came out with the full intention of commanding brigades, when divisions were not to be had.

"I wish I had a thousand like them," said Lizarraga, who was a genuine soldier, and one of the few Spaniards not unjust to foreigners.

Don Carlos shook hands with Mr. Taylor and thanked him. His Majesty spoke some few minutes in French with Mr. Sheehan, and, as the conversation gives some insight into Carlism, I may venture to repeat it.

Don Carlos.—"You have served before?"

Irish Soldier.—"Yes, sire, in the Pontifical Zouaves."

Don Carlos.—"Ha! good. In the same company with my brother, perhaps?"

Irish Soldier.—"No; but I had the privilege of knowing Don Alfonso."

Don Carlos.—"He is in Catalonia now, and has many of your old companions in arms with him. You are serving the same cause here as in Rome—the cause of religion and of order and of legitimate right."

Irish Soldier (bowing).—"I should not be here if I did not feel that, your Majesty."

Don Carlos (smiling).—"I thank you sincerely. General Lizarraga tells me you are Irish."

Irish Soldier.—"I come from the south of Ireland, sire."

Don Carlos.—"A country I feel much sympathy for. She has been very unhappy, has she not? Are things better now?"

Irish Soldier.—"For some years Ireland has been, improving, sire."

Don Carlos.—"That is well. She deserves better fortune, for she has a noble, faithful people."

Don Carlos drew back a pace and made a stiff military nod; the Irishman brought his rifle to the "present arms," turned on his heel, and marched back to the ranks, and thus the interview terminated.

The valley in which the little town of Vera nestles might have been that where Rasselas was brought up, so secluded, smiling, and peaceful it looks. The Bidassoa, famous in tales of the Peninsular War, flows through it, no doubt; but the Bidassoa here is a trout stream winding through meadows and fields of maize, and thoughts of bloodshed are the last that would occur to anyone contemplating its mild current. The mountains walling in the vale are lined with growths of heather, fern, and blossoming furze to their very crests, and the verdurous picture they hem is one of poetic calm and plenty. Labourers are digging away in the fields below, the tinkle of cow-bells is heard from the pastures, and anon blends with their Arcadian music the soft chiming of church-bells summoning to prayer; there is a mill with its clacking wheel, and a foundry with a tuft of smoke curling from its chimney; orchards and vineyards lie side by side with patches of corn, and along the high-road peasants pass and repass, shortening their way with song and laughter, and strings of mules or droves of swine scamper by. Another Sweet Auburn of Goldsmith, in another Happy Valley of Johnson, this cosy Vera with its river and trees would seem to any English tourist ignorant of its history; but how the English tourist would be misled! Though the peasants laugh and sing, and the labourers dig, and there are outer tokens of peace, there is no peace in the valley or town; there are sights and sounds there of war, and that of the worst kind—civil war. The mill is grinding corn for the commissariat stores, the foundry turns out shot instead of ploughshares, the boxes on the mules' backs are packed with ammunition. If you listen, you will hear the roll of drums and the shrill blowing of bugles more often than the soothing bells; if you watch, you will notice that not one man in ten is unprovided with a firearm, for this quiet-looking place is the very hotbed of Carlism; the insurrectionary headquarters for the province of Navarre; the arsenal and recruiting depôt for all the provinces in revolt. The disciples of the rod have fled from it, and those of the musket have come in their stead.

At half-past four on the morning after our arrival in the mountains, I was roused from a profound sleep by the sound of the bugle. A solitary performer was blowing spiritedly into his instrument; what piece of music he was trying to execute I could not make out, but that his primary object was to "murder sleep" was evident, and he succeeded. Losing all note of time and place, I thought for a moment I was in London, and that this was a visit from the Christmas waits. But there was a liveliness in the tones incompatible with the season when the clarionet, trombone, and cornet-à-piston form a syndicate of noise, and parade the streets for halfpence. The bugle was in a jocular mood. Judge of my astonishment when I learned that this merry melody was the Carlist's reveille! The insurgents had got so far with their military organization that they had actually buglers and bugle-calls. Nay, more, they had drummers and a brass band!

Now I think of it, there is an inadvisability in my calling them insurgents while in their power; but what phrase am I to employ? In the pass in my pocket I am recommended to "the Chiefs of the Royal Army of his Catholic Majesty Charles VII.," as an inoffensive "corresponsal particular," to whom aid and protection may be safely extended. But then there are the Republicans, and if they catch me giving premature recognition in pen-and-ink to the Royalist cause, they may rightly complain that a British subject is flying in the face of the great British policy of non-intervention. I think I have discovered an escape from the dilemma. The Carlists speak of themselves as the Chicos, "the bhoys," so Chicos let them be for the future, and their opponents the troops—not that it is by any means intended to be conveyed that the troops so called are much more martial than the Chicos.

Well, the boys have got buglers who bugle with a will. They blow a blast to rouse us, another for distribution of rations; they have the assembly, the retreat, the "lights out," and all the rest, as regular as the Diddlesex Militia. I got up in the Cora's house, looked at the Cura's pictures—which were more meritorious as works of piety than as works of art—and hastened to the Plaza, where I was told there was about to be a muster of the Chicos, and I would have a leisurely opportunity of passing them under inspection. The Plaza is a flagged space enclosed on two sides by houses, some of which are over a couple of centuries old, with armorial bearings sculptured over the doors; on the third by the Municipality; and on the fourth by a grey church, lofty and large, seated on an eminence and approached by a flight of stone steps. The Municipality is a massive building, level with the street, with a colonnaded portico, and a front over which some artist in distemper had passed his brush. This façade is eloquent with mural painting, if one could only understand it all. There are symbolic figures of heroic size, coveys of cherubs, hatchments, masonic-looking emblems, and inscriptions. A Carlist sentry, dandling a naked bayonet in the hollow of his arm, was pacing to and fro in the portico, and the remaining warriors of the post were lounging about, cigarette in mouth, much as our own fellows do outside the guard-house on Commercial Square, at Gibraltar. I was curious to see the Carlist uniform. Assuredly the uniform does not make the soldier, but it goes a great way towards it. Uniformity was the least striking feature in the dress of the men before me. They were clad in the ordinary garb of the mountain-peasants. Short coarse jackets and loose trousers, confined at the waist by a faja, or girdle of bright-coloured woollen stuff, were worn by some; blouses of serge, knee-breeches, and stockings or gaiters, by others; but all, without exception, had the boina, or pancake-shaped woollen cap of the Basque provinces, and the alpargatas, or flat-soled canvas shoes. By-and-by was heard a bugle-blast and the quick, regular tread of marching men, and the head of a company came in sight. In perfect time the company paced, four deep, into the Plaza, halted, and fell into line in two ranks. Thus, in succession, seven other companies arrived, forming the fifth, battalion of Navarre, a vigorous, wiry set of men, impressing the experienced eye as excellent raw material for soldiers, albeit got up in costume very much resembling that of brigands of the Comic Opera. Physically, the natives of the hilly northern provinces are the pick of Spain. The battalion had its flag, white between two stripes of scarlet, on which was inscribed the name of the corps, and the legend, "The country for ever, but always in honour." This was, of course, written in Basque, of which my rendering is rather free, but it gives exactly the sense of the sentiment. It was soon palpable to anybody, who knows anything of such matters, that the Chicos were weak in officers of the proper stamp, and still more so in under-officers. Smoking was common in the ranks, and when the men stood at ease, they stood very much at ease indeed. The officers, in some cases, were distinguished in dress from the privates solely by gold or silver tassels dependent from their boinas, and their boinas were of blue, white, brown, or even Republican red, according to the fancy of the wearer. All the officers had revolvers and swords. The men were armed somewhat indiscriminately, one company with Chassepots, another with Remingtons; there were carbines, and percussion rifles, and smooth-bores, and even a few flint-locks; but I failed to discern a single specimen of the trabuco, the bell-mouthed blunderbuss we are accustomed to associate with the Spanish knight of the road. Ammunition was carried in a waist-belt, with a surrounding row of leather tubes lined with tin, each of which held a cartridge—in fact, the Circassian cartouch-case. There were many grizzled weather-stained veterans in the ranks who had fought with Zumalacárregui and Mina in the Seven Years' War; but as a rule the Chicos were literally boys in age, and here and there a child of twelve or fourteen might be seen measuring himself beside a patriotic musket. In relief to the peasant dresses were to be noticed frequent attempts at more soldierly costume in the shape of worn tunics of the French National Guards or Moblots, and some half-dozen uniforms of the Spanish Line, with the glazed képi exchanged for the boina. On the top of many of the boinas, fastening the tassel, was a huge brass button, with the monogram of the "King," and the inscription, "Voluntarios, Dios, Patria, y Rey." Another sign particular of this irregular force that impressed me much was a bleeding heart embroidered on a small scrap of cloth, and sewn on the left breasts of nearly all on the ground. This appeared to be worn as a charm against bullets; and with a strong notion that it would protect them in the hour of danger, I am convinced nine out of ten of those peasants carried it. It may be as well to add that inside that embroidered patch were written, in Spanish, the words, "Stop; the heart of Jesus is here; defend me, Jesus." Many others of the Carlists carried scapulars, rosary beads, and blessed medals as pious reminders. The habit of wearing this representation of the heart of the Saviour over the region of the human heart dates so far back as the Vendean War, and had been introduced in the present instance by M. Cathelineau, grandson of the celebrated French Royalist loader.

The battalion had assembled on the Plaza to give up their old arms, and to receive a portion of those which had been landed from the San Margarita. They deposited those they had with them by sections in the Municipality, and emerged with the others, bright, brand-new Berdan breechloaders. They seemed proud of their weapons; some went so far as to kiss them; and, if looks were any criterion of feelings, their glowing faces said, as emphatically as it could be said, "Now that we have good tools, we shall show what good work we can do." Boxes of metallic ball-cartridges, centre-primed, were piled on the Plaza, and were quickly and quietly opened and distributed. Not an accident occurred in the process. Many a less wonderful phenomenon has been advertised as a miracle. I fully expected to have my coat spattered with some warrior's brains every other moment, with such a reckless rashness were the rifle-muzzles poked about. One shot did go off, while a high private was trying if his cartridge fitted to the chamber; the charge singed the hair of a captain, and the bullet lodged in the middle of the word "Prudencia" on the façade of the Municipality. The captain would have it that he was killed, spun round on his own centre like a humming-top, and finally, coming to himself, shook out his clothes in search of the lead. There was a roar of laughter, and the careless soldier who had endangered the life of his officer was allowed to pass without rebuke. That was the worst point in Carlist discipline I had seen yet. There was too much familiarity towards superiors; the rank and file lacked that fear and respect for the officers which are the strongest cement of the military fabric. This was to be explained partly because the officers were not above the men in social position, and partly because any enterprising gentleman who bought gold braid and tassels, sported a sword, and appraised himself an officer, was accepted at his own valuation.

CHAPTER IX.

The Cura of Vera—Fueros of the Basques—Carlist Discipline—Fate of the San Margarita—The Squadron of Vigilance—How a Capture was Effected—The Sea-Rovers in the Dungeon—Visit to the Prisoners—San Sebastian—A Dead Season—The Defences of a Threatened City—Souvenirs of War—The Miqueletes—In a Fix—A German Doctor's Warning.

These horrible and bloodthirsty Carlists turned out to be amiable individuals on acquaintance. I suppose they could put on a frown for their enemies, but for my companions and myself they had nothing but open smiles and hearty hand-grips. One great recommendation was our being billeted on the parish priest. His reverence had none of the Santa Cruz in him; he was a gentle, zealous, studious clergyman, yet was filled with the purest enthusiasm for the cause of what he regarded as legitimacy. The Don Carlos who raised the standard in 1833, he maintained, was the rightful heir to the throne of Spain. The law by which the succession had been changed was an ex post facto law, passed after his birth, and not promulgated until Ferdinand VII. had a female child. In May, 1845, that Don Carlos, really Charles V., resigned in favour of his son, Charles VI., and in September, 1868, he, in his turn, relinquished his rights to the present claimant to the throne, Charles VII., whom might God preserve.

The Cura was unusually civil towards us because we were Irish, and as Irish were presumably of clean lineage—that is to say, free from kinship with Jews or infidels. As reputed descendants of settlers from Bilbao, we were entitled to a full share in all the privileges of the province of Biscay. This was as well to know. It was a consolation to us to learn that it was an advantage to be Irish somewhere under the sun. The King of Spain is but Lord of Biscay, and has to swear under the oak-tree of Guernica to respect the fueros or customs of the province. Don Carlos had so done; he was in Spain, it was true, but where he was at the moment the Cura was unable to say; his court was perambulatory.

The fueros were abolished by the Cortes in 1841 and but partially restored in 1844, so that in inscribing them as one of the watchwords on their banner, the Basques were fighting for something more solid than glory. They cling to their rights as Britons do to Magna Charta, only with this difference—they have a clearer conception of what they are. I had been trying to arrive at some knowledge of the fueros, and obtained much information from a volume by the late Earl of Carnarvon.[D] Guipúzcoa, Alava, and Biscay, though an integral part of the Spanish monarchy, for ages enjoyed their own laws, and a recapitulation of some which were in force in Biscay will be a fair sample of all. Biscay was governed by its own national assemblies, arranged its own taxation, yielded contributions to the Sovereign as a free gift, had no militia laws, was exempt from naval impressment, provided for its own police in peace and its own defence in war. No monopoly, public or private, could be established there. Only Biscayans by birth could be nominated to ecclesiastical appointments; every Biscayan was noble, and his house was inviolable; there was perfect equality of civil rights. In short, those Basques flourished under the amplest measure of Home Rule, and had all the benefits of the Habeas Corpus Act under another name long before that Bill was legalized by the Parliament of Charles II. The liberty-loving Basques were tolerant as well as independent. The Inquisition was never vouchsafed breathing-room in their midst. When Protestants escaped from France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, they were treated to asylum amongst them.[E]

We moved about among the guerrilleros. They were mostly light-limbed and stalwart men, and were none the worse for the sprinkling of seniors of sixty and lads of sixteen. Many had the bow-legs of the mountaineer, built like the hinder pair of artillery-horses—the legs that tell of muscularity and lasting stamina. Their drill was very loose, and skill in musketry left much to be desired. They had no perception of distance-judging, and some were so grossly ignorant of the mechanism of their weapons that they knocked off the back-sights of their rifles, alleging that they hindered them from taking correct aim. The Marquis de la Hormazas—a meagre, tall, elderly man—was commandant of the battalion, and was stern in the exaction of discipline. During the stay of the Navarrese at Vera, a captain was degraded to the ranks for having entered the lists of illicit love. The Frenchwoman who was the partner of his amour was politely shown over the mountain and warned not to return.

The battalion left for the interior of the province. Leader was still too weak to enter on a campaign; Sheehan had to look after the belongings of his comrade Taylor, and break the news of his death to his mother; and I saw plainly that it was out of the question attempting to catch up the flitting headquarters of Don Carlos without a horse. Besides, I had to complete arrangements for the transmission of letters and telegraphic messages when I had any to send, and for the reception of money; in sum, to open up communication with a base. So we returned to France as we came.

On arriving at St. Jean de Luz, a startling rumour awaited us. The steel-built Carlist privateer had been captured at the mouth of the Adour; she had been taken a prize to San Sebastian; Stuart and Travers were in close custody; and there were alarmists who whispered that they would be tried by drum-head as pirates, and hung up in chains in the cause of humanity. It was well for me I did not accept the invitation to that water-party. I ran over to Bayonne to ascertain what particulars I could, saw the Carlist Junta, the British and Spanish Vice-Consuls, and from their combined and conflicting narratives was able to sift some grains of the authentic. But the sudden first report was undeniable. The weasel had been caught asleep.

The San Margarita was a serious loss to the cause. She had cost £3,500. She was very fast, being capable of a speed of between ten and eleven knots an hour, and should be equal to fourteen knots if her lifting screw had another blade. A three-bladed screw had been provided, and was to have been fitted to her stern on her return from the ill-fated expedition which put an end to her roving career. It was true that the descendant of kings was under bolts and bars. The French journals described him as a "Monsieur Stuart, a Scotch colonel, entrusted by the English Catholics with collections for the Carlist cause." They had never heard of his royal lineage, of his connection with the Austrian cavalry, or of his exploits by the side of the unhappy Maximilian in Mexico. He assumed the responsibility of ownership of the vessel. The hue-and-cry description of him was "a man of forty to forty-five years of age, over middle height, figure spare, features thin, and resolute in expression."

The burly bronzed Corkonian was also in durance, and with the pair of officers were a picked crew of thirteen Englishmen, including engineers, steward, stokers, and able-bodied seamen, and one Spanish cabin-boy. A Basque pilot, an old smuggler, familiar with every nook and crevice of the Bay of Biscay, had escaped.

If reports were credible, the San Margarita had already landed two millions of cartridges, and an immense quantity of arms. Much vexation was caused to the officers of the Spanish navy in those quarters by the stories of the daring feats she had achieved, absolutely discharging a cargo once on the very wharf of Lequeieto, as if she were a peaceful merchantman, and on another occasion sending off rifles and ammunition by small boats in the dead of night, a man-of-war lying sleepily oblivious of what was going on just outside her. It was felt that her continued impunity was a reproach, and three small vessels of the Spanish navy were commissioned to cruise between Bilbao and Bayonne on the look-out for her. This little squadron of vigilance consisted of El Aspirante and El Capricho, gun-boats, and the Buenaventura, a three-gun steam-brig. On Tuesday, August 12th, the Buenaventura, flying a George's Jack at her peak, was off Fontarabia for a portion of the day, close in shore. At nightfall she disappeared—it is now supposed into the sheltered and almost invisible inlet of Los Pasages, between Fontarabia and San Sebastian. Before daybreak on Wednesday, the Carlists under Dorregaray swarmed down from the hills covering Cape Higuer. The San Margarita came in sight, and began landing arms in the same spot where the undisturbed landing of the 28th July had been effected. Not more than three hundred stand had been put on shore, and about one hundred thousand cartridges in boxes, labelled in English "metallic rolled cartridges, centre-primed," when she had to get away, as the daylight began to play the informer. She dropped down towards Bayonne, and appears to have reached a point some four miles from the French shore (the exact distance is a moot question), where she laid to and allowed her furnaces to cool The men were "dead tired out" after their night's work, and the captain considered that he was within the protection of French waters. But there is a very ancient proverb about a pitcher and a veil, and the period of its realization had been reached at last Whilst the San Margarita was effecting the landing, a coastguard's boat had slipped from under the heights of Fontarabia, and given notice of what was going on to the Buenaventura in Los Pasages, and the brig steamed out, still with the British colours at her peak Whilst the Carlist privateer was motionless in fancied security—there was some want of prudence or vigilance there, surely—the gun-brig crept down and overhauled her before alarm could be given, and the rakish schooner-yacht, the skimmer of the seas, had the humiliation of falling a prey to a wretched slow boat that she could laugh at with steam up in the open sea. The arrest was made in the usual manner, and the captors behaved with the customary naval courtesy. They were over-joyed at their good fortune, and gave their prisoners to eat and to drink—champagne to the officers and chacoli to the men. They towed their prize into the bay of St. Sebastian, and there was triumph. The yellow and scarlet flag of Spain was over the wee San Margarita as she entered, and Colonel Stuart and Captain Travers and their companions must have felt sore, for all the good cheer and generous wine. Still there was quite a courtly scene on board—hand-shakings and reciprocal compliments—as they were marched off to the dungeon of the Castillo de la Mota on a hill in the city, where they were incarcerated. There they did not fall on such pleasant lines as afloat. The Republicans lost no time in unloading the vessel. They took off her, with a hurry that betrayed apprehension, 1,545 carbines and six Berdan breech-loaders, with a number of armourer's tools. It was remarked that the rifles supplied to the regular troops from Madrid were sighted to eight hundred metres, but that the range of those seized from the Carlists did not exceed five hundred.

I went over to San Sebastian by tug from Socoa on the 16th of August, and sent up my card to M. de Brunet, the British Vice-Consul. He said he had called on the prisoners, and that the sailors murmured at their treatment. If I went to the citadel, after three—as it was Saturday afternoon, and visiting hours commenced then—I could see them without difficulty. I did clamber up the hill, and found this was not the case. On owning that I had no pass from the military governor, I was denied admittance. Happening to meet the commandant, I represented what I wanted, and he very civilly granted me leave to visit the prisoners "para un momento." As the gates were thrown open Stuart advanced and met me, grasping my hand cordially, and slipping a letter up the sleeve of my coat. He had caught sight of me labouring up the hill, and had immediately hastened to scribble a few lines which he trusted to my sympathy with misfortune to smuggle to their destination for him. He was not mistaken, and in so doing I had no qualm of conscience. I accompanied him to his cell, and he told me the story of the capture of the San Margarita. It was substantially as I have related; they thought they were in a mare clausum, at all events they had drifted out of it on the tide of fate; but there was a nice question of international law. The ruse of hoisting the British flag was legitimate if the Buenaventura substituted her own flag before proceeding to board them. The San Margarita had the flags of more than one nation in her lockers; but the gun-brig had no power to act the policeman in neutral waters. There was the point. Travers was in a separate lodging; they had been accommodated at first in the one cell, but they could not agree—ashore as afloat the old feud existed. However, both assented to a truce in order to have a talk with me. They were cheerful, had cigars ad libitum (at their own expense, of course), and were permitted to get their rations from the Hôtel de Londres in the city. The cells they occupied were bare, white-washed, low-ceiled rooms, some eight paces by six. They were not so clean or well-ventilated as Newgate cells, and the beds were spread on the floor. The captives had access to newspapers and writing materials, and it is but the due of the officers in charge to testify that they were extremely affable and disposed to make their prisoners as comfortable as possible. Still, in the close, stifling weather, to be locked up within the narrow circuit of a dungeon was limbo. The pair wore their own clothes, Travers still retaining a navy-jacket with brass buttons engraved with the initials of some yacht club, and did not complain of having been subjected to indignities. While I was with them the shadow of a face darkened the window; it was a Carlist prisoner who had hoisted himself up on the shoulders of a comrade from a yard below; he had a letter in his mouth. I took it, and slipped him a bundle of cigars for distribution among his fellow cage-birds. From this it may be deduced that the gaol regulations were not very stringent. The Carlists were treated as forfeit of war, not felons, and had no honest chance of illuminating their brows with the martyr halo of Baron von Trenck or Silvio Pellico.

San Sebastian is the most modern town in the Peninsula, having been re-built in 1816, three years after its destruction by the incensed allied troops. It is a great summer resort of wealthy Spanish idlers—a sort of Madrid-super-Mare. The attractions of the capital are to be had there, with the supplementary advantages of pure air, mountain scenery, and luxurious sea-bathing on a level sandy beach. There is a public casino, and a score of clandestine hells where a fortune can be lost in a night at monté—in short, every infernal facility for Satanic gambling. Cigarettes are cheap, and so are knives. There is an Alameda, where the band plays, and a passable imitation, of the Puerta del Sol, less the fountain, in the broad arcaded Plaza de la Constitution. There is a small theatre, a spacious bull-ring, and several commodious churches, where Pepita can talk the language of fans to her heart's content. Every attraction of Madrid which could reasonably be expected is to be had, I repeat, and hidalgos and sloe-eyed senoras speckle the promenades in the gloaming, and impart a mingled aroma of garlic and gentility, pomade and pretentiousness, to the chief town of Guipúzcoa. San Sebastian would be for Madrileños what Paris is for Bostonians, if a few of the attractions of the "only court," which could not reasonably be expected, were not lacking—say an occasional walk round of the Intransigentes, to show their political muscles; a grandiloquent, frothy word-tempest in the Congress, and the Sunday cock-fight. I am speaking, be it understood, of San Sebastian in ordinary summers. A short twelvemonth before my visit, a pair of pouting English lips told me it was "awfully jolly."

At the date with which I am concerned, it was anything but "awfully jolly." The fifteen thousand rich visitors who were wont to flock into the city during the season had gone elsewhere to recruit their health on the sands and lose their money at the gaming-tables. They had been frightened to the coasts of France by the apparition of Carlism, and San Sebastian was plaintive. Her streets and her coffers were empty. The campamento of bathing-huts was ranged as usual on the velvet rim of the ear-like bay, but no bathers were there. There were more domestics than guests in the hotels; and at the table d'hôte three sat down in a saloon designed for a hundred to breakfast in; and we had no butter. The peasants in the country round were afraid to bring in the produce of their dairies and barn-yards. The bull-ring was to let; conscientious barbers shaved each other or dressed the hair on the wax busts in their windows, in order to keep alive the traditions of their craft; the fiddlers in the concert-room of the casino scraped lamentations to imaginary listeners. A Sahara of dust had settled on the curtain of the theatre, and fleet-footed spiders made forages athwart it from one cobwebby stronghold to another. The once festive resort had lost its spirits completely, and all on account of this civil war. It was summer, but the city was in a state of hibernation. No business was done in the shops, the cafés were empty, most of the resident population who could afford it had emigrated, and the public squares were as vacant as if there were a perpetual siesta. There was no sign of animation, as we understand it in England. There were but three vessels in the west bay—the Buenaventura, a merchant steamer, and the San Margarita, pinioned at last, her yellow funnel cold. Sojourn in the place was insupportable. I knew not how to kill the tedious hours. I climbed again to the Castle of the Mota, inspected some English tombs on the slope of the acclivity, and noticed that if the citadel is still a position of strength, nature deserves much of the credit. The defences recently thrown up had been devised and executed carefully, and if the defenders were only true to themselves, the Carlists, with no better artillery than they possessed, might as well think of taking the moon as of entering San Sebastian. They would have a formidable fire from well-planted cannon to face; stockades, and strong earthworks, and more than one blockhouse cunningly pierced with loopholes, to carry. Even if San Sebastian was entered, the configuration of the streets was such as to give every aid to disciplined men as opposed to mere guerrilleros. The city is built in blocks, on the American system; the wide thoroughfares cross each other at right-angles, and all of them could be swept as with a besom by a few guns en barbette behind a breastwork at either end. In this sort of work, accuracy of aim is not called for, as in that warfare up in the mountains. If it were, not much reliance could be placed on the Republican artillery. General Hidalgo had well-nigh nullified that arm of the service. A Carlist leader, in whose information and whose word confidence could be reposed, assured me that not a single Carlist had yet been killed or wounded by the Republican gunners. The estimated lists of the enemy's casualties given by both parties during the struggle, I may remark en passant, were grossly exaggerated. The butcher's bill was very small in proportion to the expenditure of gunpowder. Returning to the question of the defence of San Sebastian—even on the supposition that the main works and town were to fall into the hands of the Carlists, the citadel still remained, where a determined leader could hold out till relief came, as long as his provisions lasted. This lofty citadel is almost impregnable. It was hither the French retired in 1813, and it took General Graham all that he knew to dislodge them. If I were asked what were the prospects of the Carlists getting into the place, I should say there was but one—by crossing over a golden bridge. But that implied the possession of money, and money was precisely what the Carlists declared they needed most.

There was always the remote hazard of a Carlist rising in San Sebastian, for there were in the city the children of settlers from the rural districts who bit their thumbs at the sight of the muzzled San Margarita, and prayed that Charles VII. might have "his ain again." But they were in the minority. The Miqueletes, a soldierly body of men in scarlet Basque scones very like to the Carlist head-gear, and a blue capote with cape attached, garrisoned the citadel. They were brave and loyal to the Republic, and the object of deep grudge to the Chicos, for they were Basques of the towns. Many of these provincial militiamen had come in from the small pueblos in the neighbourhood, where they ran the risk of being eaten up by "the bhoys;" and this was the only accession to the population which redeemed the dismal, tradeless port from the appearance of having been stricken by plague and abandoned, and lent it at intervals an artificial bustle.

I sickened of San Sebastian, with its angular propriety; its high, haughty houses, holding up their heads in architectural primness; its wide geometrical streets, where there is no shade in the sun, no shelter in the wind. I began to hate it for its rectilinearity, and dub it a priggish, stuck-up, arrogant upstart among cities. What business had it to be so straight and clean and airy? Fain would I shake the dust off my feet in testimony against it; but here was the trouble. How to get away—that was a knotty problem. The railway had been torn up for months, and the armour-vested locomotives were rusting on the sidings at Hendaye. The dirty hot little tug, the Alcorta, that plies between the quay and Socoa, had left; and I grieved not, for the thought of a passage by her was nausea. Three more torturing hours never dragged their slow length along for me than those I spent on board her coming over. Try and call up to yourself three hours in a low-class cook-shop, coated an inch thick with filth, and fitted over the boiler of a penny steamer dancing a marine break-down on the Thames, opposite the outlet of the main-drainage pipes. That, intensified by strange oaths and slop-basins, was the passage by the Alcorta. But dreary, lonely San Sebastian was not to be endured. Those poor fellows above, accustomed to the wild freshness and freedom of the sea, how they must mourn and repine! By some means or other I must get back to the world that is not petrified. No diligences dare to affront the dangers of the short journey to the Irun railway-station, since three were stopped some days before, the traces cut, the horses stolen, the windows shattered, the woodwork burned, and the charred wreck left on the roadside, a terror to those who neglect to obey the commands of the Royalist leaders.

"Royalist prigants, serr!" shouted a corpulent German doctor, connected with mines in the neighbourhood, who retained fierce recollections of having been robbed of a "boney, capitalest of boneys for crossing a mountain."

I told the doctor I was about to trust to luck, and set out on foot if I could persuade nobody to provide me with a vehicle.

"Serr, you air mad, foolish mad," said the doctor. "Those horrid beebles, I tell you, are worse than prigants; if you hayff money, they will dake it; if you hayff not money, they will stroke your pack fifty times, pecause you hayff it not. They will cut your ears off; they will cut your nose off; they are plack tevils!"

I determined to trust to luck all the same. The black devils might not be all out so black as they were painted.

CHAPTER X.

Belcha's Brigands—Pale-Red Republicans—The Hyena—More about the San Margarita—Arrival of a Republican Column—The Jaunt to Los Pasages—A Sweet Surprise—"The Prettiest Girl in Spain"—A Madrid Acquaintance—A Costly Pull—The Diligence at Last—Renteria and its Defences—A Furious Ride—In France Again—Unearthing Santa Cruz—The Outlaw in his Lair—Interviewed at Last—The Truth about the Endarlasa Massacre—A Death-Warrant—The Buried Gun—Fanaticism of the Partisan-Priest.

There is fine scope for exaggeration in civil war; but he who wants the truth about the Montagues does not consult the Capulets. There must be bad characters amongst the Carlists, I reflected; and when they are on outpost duty at a distance from officers, and have taken a drop of aguardiente too much, they may sometimes fail to appreciate the nice distinction between meum and tuum. The band of one Belcha, which was hovering in the neighbourhood of San Sebastian, had a shady reputation. It would be unjust to tempt these simple-minded guerrilleros with the sight of a Derringer, a hunting-watch, a tobacco-pouch, or a reconnoitring-glass. All these articles are useful on the hills. But even Belcha's looters had some conscience; they drew the line at money and wedding-rings. Besides, in cases of robbery restitution was invariably made when the chiefs of the revolt were appealed to in proper form, so that on the whole the Carlists did not deserve the name the German doctor had given them. Regular soldiers do not always carry the Decalogue in their kit; there was marauding in the Peninsula, notwithstanding the iron discipline of the Iron Duke; the Summer Palace at Pekin was despoiled of its treasures by gentlemen in epaulettes, and the Franco-German War was not entirely unconnected with stories about vanishing clocks. So I would not be diverted from my purpose.

Before leaving San Sebastian I tried to obtain permission for a second visit to the citadel-prison in order to see the crew of the San Margarita, but without avail. Yet the officers in charge (all of the regular army), and indeed the privates of the local militia, were anything but truculent gaolers; they seemed willing to strain a point to oblige. The Republicanism of the officers was of a very pale red; but there was one hirsute Volunteer of Liberty who acted as chief warder, and took a delight in the occupation. He rattled his bunch of keys as if their metallic dissonance were music, grumbled at the urbanity of his superiors, and bore himself altogether as if their politics were suspicious; and he, a pure of the pure, were there as warder over that too. I nicknamed him the hyena in my own mind; but I could not conceive him laughing anywhere save in front of a garrote with a Royalist neck in the rundel, and then his laugh at best would be but the inward chuckle of a Modoc.

Stuart took the hyena coolly, regarding him as an amusing phenomenon; Travers surveyed him as he would the portrait of the Nabob on London hoardings, and pronounced him a whimsical illustration of Republican sauce. Stuart, I should have stated, was anxious that it should be known that he had caused the name of the whilom Deerhound to be erased from the list of yachts, when he chartered her as a merchant-steamer, renamed her, and went into the contraband-of-war line. It was contrary to his wish to compromise any club. The confiscated cargo was the last he had intended delivering, but he told me with a smile that ten thousand stand of rifles had already found their way to Vera. There was no legitimate explanation of the capture of the hare by the tortoise, although Travers was prepared to swear he was in French waters—he thought he was, no doubt—but he was just on the wrong side of the limit. There was one comfort. On the way to Bayonne a boat-load of men had been landed at Socoa on leave, amongst them the Basque pilot, who might otherwise have been helped to a short shrift, and the dog's death from a yard-arm.

Carlist sympathizers endeavoured to procure me a conveyance to Irun, but nobody cared to affront the loss of horses, for Belcha's band requisitioned the cattle even of those identical in political feeling—the good of the cause was their plea—so at last I was forced to say I should be glad of a trap to Los Pasages, a few miles off, whence I might be able to go forward on foot.

While I was waiting for the arrival of the vehicle, and reading El Diario, the local daily paper—a sheet the size of the palm of one's hand—until I had the contents by rote, an incident occurred to beguile suspense. The vanguard of the corps of Sanchez Bregua, the commander of the Republican Army of the North, rode into the city. They had come from Zarauz, a seaside village four leagues away—a section of mounted Chasseurs in a uniform like to that of the old British Light Dragoons. The troopers were in campaign order, with rifled carbines slung over their backs, pugarees hanging from their shakoes over their necks, and were dust-covered and sunburnt, but soldierly. They were horsed unevenly, and for light cavalry carried too great a burden. But that is not a fault peculiar to Spanish light cavalry. The average weight of the British Hussar equipped is eighteen stone. A quarter of an hour later the main body came in sight, a long column of infantry marching by fours. It was headed by a party of Civil Guards, acting as guides. As the column reached the open space by the quay, it deployed into line of companies, a movement capitally executed. The men were bigger and tougher than those of the French Line. Their uniform was similar, except that they had wings to their capotes instead of worsted epaulettes. All wore mountain-shoes, but were not hampered with tenting equipage on their knapsacks. Each battalion was led by a staff-officer, who was splendidly, or wretchedly, mounted, as his luck had served him. The company officers carried alpenstocks, and their orderlies had officers' cast foraging-caps on top of their glazed shakoes. I noticed a battalion of Cazadores, distinguished by the emblematic brass horn of chase wrought on their collars, and two companies of Engineers in uniforms entirely blue, with towers on their collars. These latter were robust, sinewy young fellows. After the infantry came a company of the 2nd Regiment of Mountain Artillery with four small pieces, each drawn by a single mule, and behind them a squadron of Mounted Chasseurs, and a long cavalcade of pack-horses and mules.

After a deal of exploration a driver was dug up, and after a deal of negotiation he consented to take me to Los Pasages. Thanks to Republican vigilance, but principally it may have been to the nature of the ground, the road thither was clear. We started at six o'clock in the evening, and after a lively spin through sylvan scenery drew up in less than an hour at the outskirts of a village on the edge of a quiet pool, which we had bordered for nigh a mile. No papers had been asked for, on leaving, at the bridge over the Urumea, where a post of volunteers kept guard by an antique and stumpy bronze howitzer, mounted on a siege-carriage, and furnished with the dolphin-handles to be seen on some of the last-century guns in the Tower Arsenal. No papers were asked for either at the Customs' station, some hundred yards farther on; but the Carabineros looked upon me as a lunatic, and significantly sibilated. None were asked for at the approach to the village. Scarcely had I alighted when a fishwife ran out of a cabin and addressed me in Basque. I could not understand her, and motioned her away, when a winsome lassie of some eighteen summers, tripping up the road, came to my aid, and began speaking in French as if she were anticipating my arrival.

"Monsieur wants a shallop to go to France?"

I was taken aback, but answered, "Yes."

"Monsieur will follow me."

And she gave me a meaning sign—half a wink, half a monition. I followed, and examined my volunteer guide more attentively. What a prize of a girl! Hair black as night, but with a glossy blackness, was parted on her smooth forehead, and retained behind, after the fashion of the country, by a coloured snood, but two thick Gretchen plaits escaped, and hung down to her waist, making one wish that she had let her whole wealth of tresses wander free. Eyes blue-black, full by turns of soft love and sparkling mischief; Creole complexion, with blood rich as marriage-wine coursing in the dimpled cheeks; teeth white as the fox's; lips of clove-pink. And what a shape had she—ripe, firm, and piquant! Do you wonder that I followed her with joy? Do you wonder that I began weaving a romance? If you do, I pity you. Did I want a shallop? Of course I did; but alas! might I not have echoed Burger's lament:

"The shallop of my peace is wrecked
On Beauty's shore."

She was a Carlist, I was sure of that. All the comely maidens were Carlists. In the service of the King the most successful crimps were "dashing white sergeants" in garter and girdle. And she took me for an interesting Carlist fugitive, and she was determined to aid in my escape. How ravishing! She was a Flora Macdonald, and I—would be a Pretender. I had fully wound myself up to that as we entered Los Pasages.

Los Pasages consists of rows of houses built on either side of a basin of the sea, entered by a narrow chasm in the high rocky coast. Sailing by it, one would never imagine that that cleft in the shore-line was a gate to a natural harbour, locked against every wind, and large enough to accommodate fleets, and whose waters are generally placid as a lake. This secure haven, statio benefida carinis, is hidden away in the lap of the timbered hills, and is approached by a passage (from which its name is borrowed) which can be traversed in fifteen minutes. The change from the boisterous Bay of Biscay, with its "white horses capering without, to this Venetian expanse of water in a Swiss valley, dotted with chalets and cottages, must have the effect of a magic transformation on the emotional tar who has never been here before, and whose chance it was to lie below when his ship entered. The refuge is not unknown to English seamen, for there is a stirring trade in minerals with Cardiff, in more tranquil times. But now Los Pasages is deserted from the bar down to the uttermost point of its long river-like stretch inland, except by the smacks and small boats of the native fishers, a tiny tug, and a large steamer from Seville which is lying by the wharf. There is no noise of traffic; the one narrow street echoes to our tramping feet as I follow my charming cicerone, who has started up for me like some good spirit of a fairy-tale. She leads me to an inn, bids me enter, and flies in search of the owner of the shallop. The landlord comes to greet me, and I recognise in him an acquaintance—Maurice, a former waiter in the Fonda de Paris, in Madrid. I questioned Maurice as to my chances of getting across to Irun by land that night; but he assured me it was too late, and really dangerous; that the road was infested by gangs of desperadoes; and that it would be safer for me to travel, even in the day-time, without money or valuables. The owner of the shallop came, but as he had the audacity to ask eighty francs for transporting me round to Fontarabia, and as I had found Maurice, I resolved to stop in Los Pasages for the night.

"You have only to cross the water to-morrow morning," said Maurice, "and you are in Kenteria, where you will be sure to get a vehicle."

The backs of the houses all overlook the port, and all are balconied and furnished with flowered terraces, from which one can fish, look at his reflection, or take a header into the water at pleasure. A glorious nook for a reading-party's holiday, Los Pasages. Not if fair mysteries like my friend crop up there; but where is she, by-the-way? She does not re-appear; but Maurice will help me to discover who and what she is.