MY FAREWELL DINNER AT GIB.

I NEED not say that " Gib " is the fretful
name—half of weariness, half of fondness—
given to Gibralter by its British garrison.

The Tegus was to sail on the Thursday;
and it was the Tuesday before that, as I was
putting on my white Spanish canvas slippers,
that that good fellow Spanker broke in,
waving the white horse-tail fan which the
hardier British officers generally carry when
riding, and delivered his winged words thus
to me, as I sat hot and puffing with the exertion
of shaving, reclining on a black, stony
horse-hair sofa in an upper room of the Club
House Hotel:

"I say, old fellow, you're in a hole."

I looked down on the floor, and saw
nothing to corroborate the gallant
subaltern's friendly alarm.

"You've put your foot in it nicely."

I looked at my boot.

"O! don't be so doosed literal. We are all
in a hole."

"What? Have the Spaniards undermined
us?"

"O! I say, old fellow, none of your
nonsense. It is so infernal hot. Have you got
any bitter beer?

Here Spanker, fixing his glass in his eye
as one would push a cap on a gun-nipple, and
abruptly rushing to the head of the stairs
roared, with a ten-pounder voice, "Now
then, look alive with that beer, will
you!— the " will you" twisting up in the
way a whip-lash laps round an urchin's
legs.

The beer was looked alive with; and a
waiter, pinching the indispensable napkin
under his arm, entered with such haste that
you would have thought he had just brewed
the beer, and was serving it up before the
bloom was off.

I was uneasy, because Spanker was
decidedly so; his glass kept dropping out
like a ripe nut out of its husk. First he
would look at one spur, then at the other;
then he brushed the dust off his boots with
a clean white handkerchief; then he got up,
and looked out between the window-blinds at
the sun and the fortifications, as if he had just
landed; or, like a merchant who was anxious
for his argosies. Then he sat down, looked
at me, brushed the white bitter froth off his
moustachios, and then flicked off, with a
Brummel particularity foreign to his nature,
a pin's-head of dust from the left knee of
his red-striped un-nameds.

At length he said, uneasily, "I must bring
it up at once, for I never can keep a secret
—you're so popular at Gib, that we are all
intending to give a doosed good dinner at the
Club House the night you sail. Now don't
say no. Dinner ordered: twenty covers, and
claret by the bucket. The Hundred-and-
Fortieth band is engaged; and it will be a
bang-up feed, I can tell you. One word:
don't ask me to return thanks for Army and
Navy: I'm no hand at speechifying."

"Who will be there?"

"Why, Driver and the Doctor, and Forbes
and Thompson, and all the fellows you
travelled with in Spain, and who are going back
in the Tegus with you. The Major will wig
me for letting the cat out of the bag, but I
can't help it; and you might, you know,
want to draw up, you know, some speech or
some—— "

"Spanker, you are a good fellow. I shall
need some preparation; but don't make me
notorious and ridiculous by sending off a
paragraph to the Times about the dinner."

Five minutes after Spanker had left, in
came the Major on heavy tip-toe to tell me
the secret also. I coloured, started, and
did the bashful and grateful. My acting
would have been worth pounds on the
hustings. No M.P. who has just received a
rotten egg in his eye could have bowed more
magnificently than I did. The Major kindly
said that Gib would be as dull the day after
I sailed as a doctor's shop in a healthy season.
I bowed again.

There were all my old friends, I found,
to be at the farewell dinner. Fortywinks,
the great traveller, still intent on his book
about Spain, and devoting his generous life
to correcting the prejudices and aberrations
of men he met at table d'hôtes. There was
to be Spanker and Driver, of course; the
very Orestes and Pylades of subalterns—
always reckless, frank, noisy, kind, and
inconsequential. There was the grave mentor
of Granada, the immortal guide Bensaken,
who had just luckily come from that
Moorish city he so much adorns, with Lady
Pentweazle and her five daughters— snub,
pert, squat, smart, and reddish. There
would be Mr. Doolan, our Xeres wine-
merchant, now at Gib on business, and Don
Sanchez Balthazar, the chivalrous enthusiast
of pictures and ballads, whom Spanker had
written to from Seville on purpose. Rose,
too, was now in Gib, fresh from an excursion
to Ronda: where he had extorted much
money from a party of tourists by pretending
to bribe off a sham band of brigands, got up
with a true artistic sense of costume—all
dirt and ribbons. Fluker, who accompanied
me to Barbary, has been staying to paint a
portrait of the town-major; the hair of whose
head seems all to have run down into
whiskers. He was waiting, like me, for the
Tegus, and will not be forgotten as an
honoured guest. Major Hodgins, the voluble
and demonstrative, who let me ride over the
Raisin mountains alone, will be in the chair,
because, as Spanker flatteringly tells him
he is "such a jolly good fellaw;" but, really,
because he has a good voice and no modesty.
To these I must add Niggle, the north-country
lawyer, who querulously contradicts almost
everything, in a cracked tip-toe voice from
Murray. Spry, the American tourist, who