whose life is a sleeping dream, and can hardly
be called a life at all: the real workers of
Spain now being all smugglers, thieves, fishermen,
sailors, and muleteers. Soup, slices of
veal, shreds of endive, a scramble a little
hasty and selfish at the dried fruit, and
ratafias, and we, one by one, push back our
chairs and rise. There is no bowing as in
polite France, or rather it is here exceptional,
and not the rule. France is vain, and therefore
polite: Spain, like England, rude, because it is
proud. The proud man wants only to win his
own approbation, therefore snubs the
indifferent world. The vain man, living on other's
smiles and approbation, pines without the
bows that he buys by bows. A sullen Vaya
con Dios is the general salutation you receive
in Spain, and that is said as if it were a curse
thrown at you, or an alms given. There can
be no politeness without a sense of equality.
The proud man hates equals, and looks on
them only as rivals. Therefore the Englishman,
if he is polite, is so on the pure traditional
habit, or from feeling that he can
assert his superiority by it. If you are
higher than he is in rank, he is polite to show
you that he is your equal. There is very
little taking off of hats in Spanish streets!
but to ladies, or the little shrivelled-up
grandees.

At the Spanish hotel there is generally a
touting commissionaire, a dry, sly, brown,
small man, who goes errands, inquires about
steam-boats, and shows you the way to
intricate churches. He goes to the post for
your letters, brings your boatman to reason,
and helps the porters and flymen to fleece
you. He leads you at night—past the flaming
lights in the frying-fish shops and past the
stall of the cobbler, who works by the flame
of a real Roman lamp—to the theatre, or to
the special café you wish to visit for the sake
of its burgess, military, or ecclesiastical
character. He waves his hand to you at
parting, and gravely bows towards your
receding boat. Let him cheat you, and he is
as faithful a rascal as the world produces,
and will let no other rogue approach your
presence.

That was my Cadiz hotel and hotel staff;
my Sevillian one I have already sketched; my
Madrid experiences are not to be now
written; but my Malaga hotel was of a far
different kind. There, I had a great modern
corner-house, large as a barracks, opening to
the parade, with blue glimpses of the Mediterranean,
down side streets, and a perpetual
procession of picturesque figures along the;
public walks. You entered a great green
and gilt gate, and found a hall surrounded
by offices. Here was the boots' den: there
the waiters' assembly-room: and, on this side,
the counting-house, which gave the place a
judicial look. You ascended flights of stairs,
winding round the centre hall, where the
bath-rooms, lined with blue porcelain-tiles,
were; half-way up, was the visitors' books
where you looked to find the names of the
odd people who had excited your curiosity
at a dinner the day before, and stared at
your great discoveries.

But the hotel at Algeziras was a place of
much greater character, because it had more
of the dawdling, slovenly Spanish in and
about it, and sailor-boys were always playing
dominoes in the door-way. All day, opposite
my window on the swelling beach, a man was
fishing with nothing on but a broad-brimmed
hat, and up to his waist in the waves that
broke round him as round a lighthouse. All
day there, the boys dabbled about, pulling
at the wet ropes fringed with weeds; or
half-stripped porters kept wading in for the
sacks of millet that the zebec had brought
from Barbary. A Frenchman, of the classic
name of Rousseau, kept the inn, which he
calls a Casa de Pupillos, or lodging-house.

There I sat, in a room hung round with
French prints, watching in the dusk, the
beautiful sight of the luminous surf breaking
in a line of harmless and fitful fire along
the mile of shore; while away across the
bay Gibraltar lifted up its dark mountainous
back, and answered the lights in our
windows by a string of signal-lamps. I
liked to see the periodical scowl as the evening-
gun shouted out across to us, "Take care!"
"Beware! " and then was silent. This hotel
was a ram-shackle place, chiefly remarkable
for the claret Rousseau smuggled over from
Bourdeaux, sending for it bottle by bottle
from Gibraltar.

The entrance to this auberge was a dark
passage, the play-ground of fishing-boys. A
palisaded door and a stumbling staircase
led to the dark dining-room that looked
on the sea, and to whose balcony rose, day
and night, a buzz of gossiping custom-house
officers, boatmen, and citizens.

Some of these were men who would be seized
by the Rif pirates, and kept to draw the plough,
like draught oxen. The Moors here, that
over in Gibraltar were respectable, thriving
merchants, potent on Change, they regarded
as red-handed murderers, the sworn enemies of
Christianity and Spain; robbers and heathen,
whose shaven heads, if they could seize them
on the high seas, they would lop off on the
boat's side; and though far be it from me to
revile men potent on 'Change and with an
account at their bankers', I do not think they
were far wrong, barefooted, ignorant sailors
though they were.

My dining-room, with its sitting-room
opening out of it, was far away from my
bed-room: that was up another dark,
stumbling staircase, all alone, and it led into a
deserted sitting-room, hot and stuffy, with a
window that did not open. Once in this
bedroom, I was perfectly helpless. If I had
fired off a pistol, it would not have been
heard. There was no bell, and there I sat
sighing for my boots, or longing and pining
for my abstracted trousers.