teamer's landing, and this proved the end of
our excursion in our state coach. We found other state coaches there,
and joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and
trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We
made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the
climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft
that it required great force of character to keep from buying the
flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is
a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly
failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in
the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military
memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them,
there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely
good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a
head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who
imagined our wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking
more of the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true
friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that morning
at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but we turned from
the poetic experience of this omelette in the greedy hope of better
things. Better things there could not be, but the fish was as good as
the fish at Madeira, and the belief of the chops that they were lamb and
not kid seemed better founded.

There had been an excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have
as good at some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and
the lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and Spanish undertones,
was not cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific
charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English
dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the
waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and
what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as if we
had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The table-waiter took an extra fee for
confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in
Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was
certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.

It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matte