he type, and threatened to strangle the editor if he
brought out the paper again; and the precious municipality of Cadiz has
nothing better to do than order that no mourners shall be allowed in
future to use religious exercises or emblems, to sing litanies or carry
crosses, at the open graves of relatives in the cemeteries.

In the merchants' club (of which I was made free) they were saddened at
the disrupted state of society, but took it as kismet, and seemed to
think that all would come right in the end, by the interposition of some
_Deus ex machina_. But who that God was they could not tell: he was
hidden in the womb of Fate. As Cadiz accepted its destiny with
equanimity, I accommodated myself to the situation, and did as the
natives did. I helped to fly kites from the flat housetops--a favourite
pastime of mature manhood here; I opened mild flirtations with the
damsels in cigar-shops, and discovered that they were not slow to meet
advances; I expended hours every day cheapening a treatise on the
mystery of bull-fighting, with accompanying engravings, in vain--its
price was above rubies. But my great distraction was a strange character
I met at dinner at the house of the British Consul. I did not catch his
name at our introduction, so I mentally named him Mr. Crabapple. He was
short and stout, had a round wizened face freckled to the fuscous tint
of a russedon apple, and was endowed with a voice which had all the
husky sonority of a greengrocer's. He was beardless and sandy-haired,
and one of those persons whose age is a puzzle to define; he might have
been anything between fifteen and five-and-thirty. As he talked of
Harrow as if he had left it but yesterday, I was disposed to set him
down as a queer public-school boy on vacation, until I was astounded by
some self-possessed remark on Jamaica dyewoods. We stopped in the same
hotel. One morning he descended the stairs, a sort of dressing-case in
hand, and yelled to an urchin at the door:

"Here, you son of a sea-calf, take this down to the waterside for me!"

"Will he understand you?" I said.

"Bound to," Mr. Crabapple replied; "never talk to them any other way,
anyhow. 'Tis their business to understand. Ta, ta--deuce of a hurry."

"Where are you going, may I ask?"

"Read the Church Service--rather a bore--Sunday, you know."

The nondescript, then, was a chaplain.

The same evening he returned to the hotel, and on the following morning
I saw him again descend