The ladies of the garrison at Gibraltar are not,
it is true, so numerous as they might be. Calpe
is not a popular station with military females.
There is no native Society beyond the families of
the "Rock sio pions," who are usually dealers
in mixed pickles and Allsopp's pale ale, and a
few Spaniards who earn a remunerative but
immoral livelihood by coining bad dollars and
smuggling Manchester cottons and Bremen
cigars through San Roque; and unfortunately,
to ladies of a theological turn, one of the chief
charms of a sojourn in a foreign garrison is
here lacking. There is nobody to convert in
Gibraltar but the Jews; and as it takes about
a thousand pounds sterling to turn a Hebrew
into a Christian—and a very indifferent Christian
at that, for you have to set him up in
business and provide for his relations to the
third and fourth generation—missionary enterprise,
to say the least, languishes. With all
these drawbacks, I am told that English female
society at the Rock is charming; that their
costume, their features, and their manners are
alike sprightly and vivacious, and that the
"girls of Gib," as regards that rapidity and
entrain which are so pleasingly characteristic of
modern life, are only second to the far-famed
merry maidens of Montreal, whose scarlet
knickerbockers and twinkling feet disporting
on the glassy surface of the Victoria "Rink,"
have led captive so many old British grenadiers.
When a maiden of Montreal is unusually rapid
—what is termed "fast" in this country—they
say she is "two forty on a plank road," two
minutes and forty seconds being the time in
which a Canadian trotter will be backed to get
over a mile of deal-boarded track.

Now, whatever could Monsieur Gautier have
been thinking of so to libel the ladies of
Gibraltar? They slow! They angular! They
"avec la dimarche d'un grenadier"! They
addicted to the national ejaculation of "Shocking!"
That old oak, however, of prejudice is
so very firmly rooted, that generations, perhaps,
will pass away ere foreigners begin to perceive
that the stiff, reserved, puritanical Englishman
or Englishwoman, if they still indeed exist, and
travel on the Continent, have for sons and
daughters ingenuous youths, who in volatile
vivacity are not disposed to yield the palm to
young France, and gaily-attired maidens, frolicsome,
not to say frisky, in their demeanour. It
is curious that the French, ordinarily so keen
of perception and so shrewd in social dissection,
should not, by this time, have discovered some
other and really existent types of English
tourists, male and female, to supply the place of
the obsolete and well-nigh mythical "Mees,"
with her long ringlets, her green veil, her large
hands and feet, and her figure fall of awkward
and ungainly angles. And may not the British
Baronet, with his top-boots, and his bull-dog,
and his hoarse cries for his servant "Jhon,"
and his perpetual thirst for "grogs," be reckoned
among the extinct animals? I was reading only
yesterday, in the Chronique of one of the minor
Parisian journals, a couple of anecdotes most
eloquent of the false medium through which we
are still viewed by the lively Gaul. In the first,
the scene is laid at the Grand Hôtel. An
Englishman is reading the Times and smoking a
cigar. It is a step in advance, perhaps, that the
Briton should have come to a cabana instead of
pulling at a prodigiously long pipe. The
Englishman happens to drop some hot ashes on the
skirt of his coat. "Monsieur, monsieur!" cries
a Frenchman sitting by, "take care, you are on
fire!" "Well, sir," replies the Briton, indignant
at being addressed by a person to whom he
has not been formally introduced, "what is
that to you? You have been on fire twenty
minutes, and I never mentioned the fact." I
refrain from giving the wonderful Anglo-French
jargon in which the Englishman's reply is
framed. The second anecdote is equally choice.
An English nobleman is "enjoying his
villeggiatura at Naples"—by which, I suppose, is
meant that he is betting on the chances of a
proximate eruption of Mount Vesuvius—when
his faithful steward, Williams Johnson, arrives
in hot haste from England. "Well, Williams,"
asks the nobleman, "what is the matter?" "If
you please, milor, your carriage-horses have
dropped down dead." "Of what did they die?"
"Of fatigue. They had to carry so much water
to help put out the fire." "What fire?" "That
of your lordship's country-house, which was
burnt down on the day of the funeral." "Whose
funeral?" "That of your lordship's mother,
who died of grief on hearing that the lawsuit
on which your lordship's fortune depended had
been decided against you." Charming
anecdotes are these, are they not? The gentleman
who popped them into his column of chit-chat
gave them as being of perfect authenticity and
quite recent occurrence, and signed his name at
the bottom; and yet I think I have read two
stories very closely resembling them in the
admired collection of Monsieur Joseph Miller.

The Englishman who is the hero of cock-and-bull
stories, and the English lady who is always
veiling her face with her fan, and exclaiming
"Shocking!" are so dear to the French and
the general continental heart, that we must look
for at least another half century of railways,
telegraphs, illustrated newspapers, and international
colleges, before the mythical period passes away
and the reign of substantial realism begins. I
remember at the sumptuous Opera House at Genoa
seeing a ballet called The Grateful Baboon, in
which there was an English general who wore a
swallow-tail coat with lapels, Hessian boots with
tassels, a pigtail, colossal bell-pull epaulettes,
and a shirt-frill like unto that of Mr. Boatswain
Chucks. The audience accepted him quite as a
matter of course, as the ordinary and recognised
type of an English military officer of high rank;
and then I remembered that during our great war
with France, Genoa had been once occupied by
an English force under Lord William Bentinck,
and that his lordship had probably passed bodily
into the album of costumes of the Teatro
Carlo Felice, and remained there unchangeable
for fifty years. In like manner the Americans,