and round while Espartero was bombarding
the city, warded off the iron storm from the
sacred fane.

Now, the sun of Andalusia, though a scorcher
when considered from a European point of view,
is a mere refrigerator when compared with the
great fiery furnace set up within the domains of
the Southern Cross. I am not prepared to
deny that the preparation of some of the stews
we had for dinner might have been accelerated
by the monstrous kitchen-range overhead; but
I shrink from asserting as a positive fact that
the old negress, who used to belabour the donkey
with the ladle, fried her eggs in the sun. No, I
will grant at once that her pots and pans were
set upon little braziers full of hot ashes; but
still, without the sun, I don't think her viands
would have been cooked to her or our liking.
She evidently gloried in the sun, and frizzled in
it, bareheaded, while her eggs and sausages
frizzled in their own persons. Not till her work
was done would she bind her temples with the
yellow bandana, or the gorgeous turban of
flamingo hue, and, sitting down in a rocking-
chair, fan herself with a dignified air, as though
she were the Queen of Spain and had no legs.
The oscillations of the chair, however, proved
the contrary. She had legs which Mr. Daniel
Lambert might have beheld, not unenvious.
Good old black cook! She was like Sterne's
foolish fat scullion dipped in a vat of Brunswick
Black. She was gross and oily, and showed a
terrible temper, especially towards troublesome
piccaninnies and refractory fowls who showed an
ungrateful unreadiness in being caught and
strangled and plucked, and trussed and broiled,
and served hot with mushrooms, all under half
an hour's time; but, her little irritation once
over, she was—until a roving donkey called for
the ministrations of the ladle—all grins and
chuckles and broad guffaws and humorous
sayings. She would sing a fragment of a song, too,
from time to time—a wild song of Congo sound,
and which needed the accompaniment of a banjo.
The refrain had some resemblance to the word
ipecacuanha pronounced very rapidly and with a
strong guttural accent, and yet I dare say it was
all about love, and the home of her youth on the
burning banks of Niger.

Where did all those piccaninnies come from?
"Who owned them? The landlord of El Globo
was a bachelor; the waiters did not look like
married men; and yet, from the youthful brood
strewn about the patio, you might have fancied
Brigham Young to be the proprietor of the
place. " Strewn about" is the only term to use
with reference to the piccaninnies. Their age
averaged between twenty and thirty months.
Nobody nursed them; they were too small to
stand, and so they sprawled, and crawled, and
wriggled, and lay, and squalled, and kicked, and
basked in the sun like little guinea-pigs. I have
seen a piccaninny in a dish; I have seen a
piccaninny in a wooden tray, like a leg of pork just
delivered by the butcher. They were of all
colours—blue-black, brown-black, chocolate,
bistu, burnt sienna, raw sienna, cadmium yellow,
and pale creole white. I am afraid all these
piccaninnies, save those of the last-named hue,
were slaves, and the children of slaves. Not
one of the least suggestive—to some it may be
one of the most painful—features of bondage is
that free white and black slave children grow up
together in perfect amity and familiarity, are
playmates, and foster-brothers and sisters. The
great social gulf which is to yawn between them
—so fair and jewelled with flowers on one side,
so dark and hideous on the other—is in infancy
quite bridged over. The black piccaninnies
sprawl about the verandahs, and the court-yards,
and the thresholds of the rooms of their owners,
and the white piccaninnies sprawl in precisely
the same manner. That fat old cook, for
instance, made no more distinction between a
white and a black urchin than between a black
and a white fowl. Before ever she could address
herself to the concoction of a dish, two ceremonies
were gone through. A piccaninny had to
be fed, and another piccaninny had to be spanked.
For the purpose of feeding, that invaluable ladle,
dipped in a bowl of saffron porridge, came into
play; the spanking was done with her broad
black hand. She was quite impartial, and
distributed the spanks ana the spoonfuls in strict
accordance with the maxims of equity. Thus,
if a piccaninny yelped, it was fed; but if it yelped
after it was fed, it was spanked. And subsequent
to both spooning and spanking, the fat old cook
would catch the child up in her arms and sing
to it a snatch of the famous song that ended
with ipecacuanha.

So have I seen many dinners cooked. So I
have seen my made-dish running about the patio
with flapping wings and dismal " grooping"
noise, to be at last caught and sacrificed to the
culinary deities, and to appear at the evening
meal, grilled, with rich brown sauce. And so at
last the drama of the day would be played out;
and coming home late, and leaning once more
over the rails of the gallery, I would gaze then
on the patio all flooded in moonlight of emerald
green: pots and pans and plates and crates and
baskets and braziers and vegetable rubbish, all
glinting and glancing as though some fairy
property-man had tipped their edges with the green
foil-paper of the playhouse.

MR. CHARLES DICKENS'S READINGS
MR. CHARLES DICKENS will read at ST. JAMES'S
HALL on Tuesday the 12th of June, that being the last
night of the series.

Shortly will be published, in Three Volumes,
THE SECOND MRS. TILLOTSON.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "NEVER FORGOTTEN."
Tinsley Brothers, 18, Catherine Street, London.