mere shapeless lumps of copper, brown
and shiny, looking much as if just dug from
the mine, not much unlike those massy strongly
stamped coins with Vespasian and his eagle
stamped upon them, that you dig up round
the grassy-mounded ramparts of the Roman
camps in England. The thought struck me
that, perhaps, in the natural warmth of my
charity I had given to the one-eyed beggar
with the dirty bandages round his feet, an
antiquarian treasure. I left Salamanchino
going along innocently heedless, and ran
back headlong, like a possessed man, to the
old man; whom, with a yellow handkerchief
strained over his head and tied in a knot
behind, I could see, passing the cathedral
door, and just entering a brandy shop. He
gulped down an egg-cup full of brandy
and anisette, when I seized him by the arm,
and said:—

"My dear friend, give me back those coppers?"

To my astonishment, the beggar gave me
a frightened stare, cried, "No, no, rather
death;" and made a bolt, (forgetting to pay
for his aniseed), under the flapping brown
curtain of the adjacent church, where I did
not care to follow him.

I explained the case to the landlord of the
brandy-shop, above whose head I read a
notice requesting alms "to liberate the souls
in purgatory," the souls being represented
by little naked men, frying in a vermilion and
gamboge fire.

"Poor man!" said the landlord, winking at
some muleteers, "he thought you were going
to strike him. We Malagese do not know
the way of you Señores Ingleses; but it is
hard that no one pays for my anisette."

I threw down the pence, and, in return,
was allowed a free antiquarian rummage of
the landlord's till, which was not altogether
fruitless.

Then I fell into the position of an
exponent of English manners; and, sitting
down on a precarious bench, had to explain
to a lively young Spanish artilleryman that
Ireland was not a suburb of London; and
that Kent was not a kingdom, but only a
province. The fame of these disclosures sucked
in nearly everybody that passed by the door,
including various muleteers in tight chesnut-
coloured breeches and silvery buttons: also a
man carrying on his head a pig-skin of wine,
which looked like a little water-bed, the legs
tied up to serve as spouts. It even drew in
magnetically the escribano, or public letter
writer, whom I had often stopped to look at,
as he sat in his open doorway at a rickety
deal table, garnished with inkstand, pen, and
paper, wrapped in his threadbare blue cloak,
waiting for black-haired maidens who,
unable to write to absent lovers, feel that
sort of dumb longing, which the young song-
bird feels ere the song comes. For such
maidens, and for anxious mothers, sits all day
our patient scribe at his desk, eyeing every
one who passes, and nibbing his pen, that he
may remind them of, or suggest to them, a
want. Then a muleteer, with his laced jacket
thrown hussar-fashion over his left shoulder,
runs out to bring in the money-changer, who
sits on a small stool at the corner of the
street before his tray, on which are ten or
twelve heaps of copper change. He being
rather an oracle, is put forward to pump and
pose me: he wants to know—and the brown
faces gather closer around me as he speaks—
whether the Queen lives in the Tower of
London, and if it is true that Prince Alberto
put to death Georgio the Third, in order to
get the throne? I set him right on these
points, and should probably have gone pretty
well through English history, when I was
interrupted by a tremendous kicking and
spluttering of hoofs outside in the rough
pebbly street.

It was a raisin-boy, having a savage struggle
with his mule, and being flung with a
tremendous bump almost at the threshold. We
all ran out. There was the beast, stubborn
and stupid as Balaam's ass, standing still
with straddling feet, with malicious eyes, all
white and turned backwards to watch the
fallen rider; over whom he now lifted up
his discordant voice in a shrill outburst of
triumph. The boy, a mass of chesnut-
coloured smalls, lay insensible on the stones,
with some kind Dolorosa already chafing his
temples, and some judicious Sancho putting
water to his white lips. An active quarrel was
getting up over the body, as over a dead
Grecian hero in the Iliad, as to whether it
was partly a fit or altogether a fall.

"Bleed him," said a passing barber.

"Extreme unction," said a cassocked priest,
on his way to dinner.

"It is nothing," said the boy's master,
coming up and shaking the boy roughly by
the thin arm.

"Nothing at all," said a wagoner, who
could not get his ox-wagon by for the
sympathising crowd.

"He is shamming," said a cocked-hat
gend'arme. "Bring the whip."

"Give him some wine," said the landlord,
holding out his hand ready to be paid before
he did the work of charity.

Suddenly, as in one of the early miracles
of the Pagan church, the boy struggled,
gathered himself up, stared at his master,
half frightened, half deprecatingly, ran and
kicked the mule in the stomach, leaped on
his back, made a push at the crowd, and
trotted coolly off, as if such ups and downs
with Malaga donkey-boys were every-day
things.

I had touched my hat to the muleteers
who, with immense dagger-knives, were
hewing their dinners out of melons large as
green kilderkins. I had paid the landlord.
I had offered the escribano a cigar, and
departed, with the usual pious recommendation
to God's blessing, when, on my way