precious ornament except to wonder where
he had lost it. Besides, if he had been taken
prisoner, he would have painted a portrait of
his master, and bought himself off in a week,
like Fra Lippo Lippi, the clever, erratic,
improvising, inconsequential fellow; or been
made prime vizier to the Emperor of Morocco,
and married his daughter. So I let him hug
his black tin colour-box, and go off to the
boat, singing something about—

"Her hand is soft as a Guelder rose,
     And every bit as white,
Her eye is dark as a summer eve,
     Or a violet by starlight."

The ferry-boat is full of barefooted fisher-
women, who, grinning and chattering, load
every one on board with English cotton hand-
kerchiefs, which we are to smuggle for them.
As for Fluker, he was ranting that the sea
we were ploughing through was so much
liquid sunshine, whereas it seemed to my
vulgar eyes, just an ocean of pale sherry.
One old Sycorax of a crone, with nutcracker
mouth and hairy chin, so stuffed him with
smuggled goods, that he was full up to the
brim, sleeves, trousers, pockets, waistcoat—
everything! I resisted a rival witch, who
began to load me in the same way, and put her
far from me, in spite of all her grinning and
wheedling, and all the deprecating hand-
wavings of the sturdy barefooted rowers; for
we were not yet in the Robinson Crusoe
zebec with the tawny red sails and the
painted Carthaginian prow of the true bean-
pod shape. Swiftly, with the great whale-
back of a rock perpetually in our eyes,
we skimmed along, and flew, and tacked,
and wheeled in the Dantzic gold water of
that luminous Pactolus. The men with
their bare bull chests, toiling at the great
oars, ran headlong about with the rope that
the moving sail dragged and lugged at
viciously.

Now the white fort arid low shore of
Algeçiras is in view, with the cocked-hatted officials
in expectant vigilance on the rough stone
jetty, on which, under a roof of mat, the
lazy sentinel nods and drowses—the rising
and falling of the empty boats slowly
mesmerising him to sleep. Now the last bundle
of cottons has been stowed away in hat and
bosom, and even those dried fish hide a
small consignment of Manchester goods: now
we bump the shore in hasty recognition, and
leap up on the broad slippery stones, in
which process one fat old gentleman flops in
between the boat and land, and is all but
drowned. Fluker, intent on some emerald
wash of water over stone, is busy with
his red-covered pocket-book, which he is
always consulting, like a priest his breviary
—honest enthusiast for red hair and
microscopic mustard and cress that he is! The
old women are out sneaking with affected
humility—treacherous as Jaels, Judiths,
and Dalilahs—past the grand officials,
who pretend, with equally affected severity,
to open every packet that they know
contains nothing. The ferry boatswain has
been round for pence, and we are landed,
ready for the zebec that with quaint latteen
rig, I see bobbing and dipping out away
yonder, where the cows are being "swum"
off alongside of boats full of soldiers and
herdsmen, all bound for the Seven Hills and
Ceuta on the African shore.

As I walk up to the hotel through the
unthrifty sand, strewn with star-fish and
intestine relics of departed mullet not yet
deodorised by the great scavenger sun, the
Arab captain, who talks reasonable English,
tells me that Algeçiras is almost supported
by the smuggling of cigars and cottons from
Gib; as indeed are half the small towns on
the neighbouring Spanish coast. The last
Alcaide, he assures me, retired on quite a
fortune realised in this patriotic and honourable
way. The women I saw go over daily
in the ferry-boat and daily smuggle. Every
now and then, to keep up appearances, like the
London police with London gambling-houses,
the officers make a swoop, and clear out the
whole trip of run cottons. I asked him if
murders by robbers were common in
Algeçiras. The Arab, shrugging up his hood,
said he had heard of but one in twenty years
he had known the place, and that was an
English gentleman murdered near Ronda by
two escaped galley-slaves from Cadiz. The
gentleman was riding in the mountains; his
sister stayed behind at a turn of the road to
sketch, when she heard a shot; and, riding
forward, found her brother dead; the thieves
had, it is supposed, followed him and been
lying in wait. They were both garotted,
though the Spaniards petitioned hard for
them.

Algeçiras we found asleep as fast as
ever. That scene of two great English
victories seems never to have recovered those
stunning blows on the head dealt by the
English fist. Half-naked boys in dirty
drawers still dabbled about the rocking
fishing-boats. Vagabond loafers still slept with
their backs to new landed bales and sacks.
There were still the string of porters
unloading millet from a Barbary barque. Still
cows wading and swimming out to board
distant Beef-boats. Still naval-looking
soldiers, drinking aniseed on sea-side wall-
benches. Still a distant salute from Gib,
with jerking rings of sudden fire and thumps
in the sky as if heavy carpets were being
beat.

All the streets and squares and bull-ring
and Prado of that dead carrion town I knew
by heart, or rather by nose. I had even
reconnoitred the intensely Spanish suburb,
beginning with dusty lanes, hemmed in with deep
irrigating ditches, walled by plantations of tall
reeds that kept whispering some new court-
secret of Midas; then one-streeted villages of
whitewashed huts with dirty, naked, ophthalmic