Roman Holidays and Others

help feeling that the famous stronghold is pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of that institution. As the lines change with the ship's course, the resemblan

last seen it four weeks ago. The eye seeks the bold, familiar legend, and one suffers a certain disapp

genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits faintly shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook's carriages which warmed us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly well kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the pictures of Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and were curtained and cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are yet unknown in southern Europe, and

ks, with bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's brother out of the Arabian Nights; the sparse mustache and short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean, dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic

t the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the London bobby the fa

or that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who directed us to a certain government office for a pe

ness of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks. But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed

buying the flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them, there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat

specific charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as

for all I know; the English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have infected it with the costliness o

ere is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard, because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf links. Gibraltar

han, I fancy, it is in this. We used then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his Tales of the Alhambra, and his history of The Conquest of Granada, and we read Prescott's histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world and the new. We read Don Quixote, which very few read now, and we read Gil Blas, which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever goi

, or to let them make one the whole way. They stand gravely opposed to any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish documents the place is styled "Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great Britain," and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a year, and many people living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its pathos, but as a selfish witness I w

uld have done at an American frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that town ar

an carabiniere and wore a cocked hat-loitered into a police station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street except those bouffe boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms. Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it wa

left by that dusty, empty, silent street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience, and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it

Till one has seen it from this point one has not truly seen it. The vast stone shows like a half from which the other half has been sharply cleft and removed, that the sense of its precipitous magnitude may