eet.

My first walk in Gibraltar was in search of a palm-tree. After threading
the whole length of the town, I found two small ones in a garden, in the
bottom of the old moat. The sun was shining, and his rays seemed to fall
with double warmth on their feathery crests. Three brown Spaniards,
bare-armed, were drawing water with a pole and bucket, and filling the
little channels which conveyed it to the distant vegetables. The sea
glittered blue below; an Indian fig-tree shaded me; but, on the rock
behind, an aloe lifted its blossoming stem, some twenty feet high, into
the sunshine. To describe what a weight was lifted from my heart would
seem foolish to those who do not know on what little things the whole tone
of our spirits sometimes depends.

But if an even balance was restored yesterday, the opposite scale kicked
the beam this morning. Not a speck of vapor blurred the spotless crystal
of the sky, as I walked along the hanging paths of the Alameda. The sea
was dazzling ultra-marine, with a purple lustre; every crag and notch of
the mountains across the bay, every shade of brown or gray, or the green
of grassy patches, was drawn and tinted with a pencil so exquisitely
delicate as almost to destroy the perspective. The white houses of
Algeciras, five miles off, appeared close at hand: a little toy-town,
backed by miniature hills. Apes' Hill, the ancient Abyla, in Africa,
advanced to meet Calpe, its opposing pillar, and Atlas swept away to the
east ward, its blue becoming paler and paler, till the powers of vision
finally failed. From the top of the southern point of the Rock, I saw the
mountain-shore of Spain, as far as Malaga, and the snowy top of one of the
Sierra Nevada. Looking eastward to the horizon line of the Mediterranean,
my sight extended so far, in the wonderful clearness of the air, that the
convexity of the earth's surface was plainly to be seen. The sea, instead
of being a plane, was slightly convex, and the sky, instead of resting
upon it at the horizon, curved down beyond it, as the upper side of a horn
curves over the lower, when one looks into the mouth. There is none of the
many aspects of Nature more grand than this, which is so rarely seen, that
I believe the only person who has ever described it is Humboldt, who saw
it, looking from the Silla de Caraccas over the Caribbean Sea. It gives
you the impression of standing on the edge of the earth, and looking off
into space. From the mast-head, the oce