jacket, red faja, black cap, staff, and embroidered
leather greaves, has a bright little
whitewashed hut up somewhere in the brown
mountains, and has his walls hung with
festoons of dull purple raisins, behind which
the scorpion hatches her poison eggs.  He
has a red and yellow saint or two over his
window and door; and, on the shining walls
outside, are scarlet strings of pungent capsicums
ready for the winter olla, when
pomegranate salad is gone, and the melon has
grown from green to gold, and from gold to
dust.  I can fancy this old fellow (Pablo, I
daresay, or Perez) about a week before the
vintage, watching with his bell-mouthed
trabuco in his reed hut, and slanging
intruders, like the abusive vindemiator in
our old friend Horace, picking the orange
just yellowing in October in pyramids ready
for its sea-trip, or shaking the cochineal insect
from its cactus home, or hauling in wallowing
silver masses of the janquete fish—the whitebait
of Malaga—or selling the soapy sweet
batata ready boiled in the streets, or cutting
sweetmeat lengths of the fresh sugar-cane, or,
in fact, pursuing any of the other avocations
practised by the saltfish-loving, raisin-drying,
bull-fighting, revolutionising people of Malaga.
That sheltered, orange-grove city, of which
the poet sings—

Jewel of the mountain ring,
City of perpetual Spring;
City that the sea still kisses;
Where the wind is dower'd with blisses
From the starry jasmine flowers,
And the thousand orange-bowers.

A greater compliment than they pay to
Marbella adjoining, so called from Queen
Isabella's exclaiming, when she saw first its
green hills, pleasant streams, shady groves,
and fruitful gardens, "Que mar tan bella!"
(What a beautiful sea!)  The abusive
proverb is:

Marbella e bella, no entres en ella,
Quien entra con capa, sale sin ella.

(Marbella is fair, but be wise, have a care,
If you go with a cloak, you will come out quite
bare.)

Indeed every Spanish city has one of these
droll diatribes written about it, as Madrid,
where they say, "The river is beatiful, if
it were not always dry," and of Seville, the
proverb-makers go on to say, slanderously
no doubt, that this is the city where

The men are fire, and the women are tow,
Puff—comes the devil—away they go.

This Seville is the city where the moon
sets more people on fire than the sun, as I
should say, from the quantity of lovers
whispering you see on the benches of the
public walks; whether you go to the old
Alameda by the ruined palace of the dukes
of Medina Sidona, or the bran new orange-
planted square of the Constitution, where the
band, when they are at a loss, seem always
to play.

Although I am tortured by a toothache
which turns my hollow bone into a howling
den of pain, I bend my errant steps to the
ruinous square and unfinished monument in
the Plaza del Riego, which commemororates the
shooting to death of those unlucky émuetists
whose fate Carlyle's Sterling, that almost
poet, almost novelist, was so nearly sharing.
A moment ago the sun seemed double-gilt,
with this demon in my hollow bones, I see a
sudden fog of Fleet Street thickness rising
over things, like the gauze veils in the solemn
part of a pantomime introduction.  As I
walk down the narrow, stall-crowded street,
buffeted by mules pertinaciously disciplined
as to their rank of Indian file, I think
of all the disagreeable things that have
ever happened to me. Shall I entrust
myself to a local Sangrado, with his bright
brass basin notched for the chin, bandaged
staff, and razor large as a scimitar?  No;
for I know he will smile, set to work, and
examine my mouth with snuffy fingers, just
as if he was taking a hook out of a fish's
throttle.  He will take out the wrong tooth,
rinse it down the sink-hole with a swash and
gurgle before I can identify it, or will
struggle with me as if he were fighting with
wild beasts at Ephesus, end by upsetting
the chair, falling on top of me, and
triumphantly claim two guineas for breaking
my jaw.  No, I determine to forget pain
like the philosopher who sang a comic song
all the while the Grecian tyrant was pounding
him to death in the mortar.  I climb up
the steep, dusty hill, coasting the long lines of
low breastworks to that squat, blind Moorish
castle, that Blake, winding up his angry
moustachios, threatened with his English
cannon, and, getting nothing but a bonny
blue blink of the bay, squatter down again;
and then, leaving the poverty-struck white
houses and the prickly-pears of the suburbs,
roam out to the lighthouse, that all night
long winks with its one inflamed eye to
distant and troubled ships, just as an ophthalmic
money-lender in a "silver hell" winks to
prodigals, quite at sea as to pecuniary matters,
and chasing a fourpenny-bit in and out the
latch-key in their pockets.  I go—and, like
a modern Marius, sit on the ruins of
myself, there among the great dull-red ruby
blocks and opaque slaty sapphires, over
which the sea lathers and worries in a
musical, refreshing way, troubled, but still
with a trouble this is lullabied by the beauty
and softness of the climate and the day, and
I think of how this very day ten years ago
I was sitting in a little Cornish bay, where
the headlands are of a rosy granite, and the
bases under the sea seem giant blocks of
emerald; where the sand was rifted white
as snow all round the old broken anchor it