me hours at the ebb. The Channel squadron was coming
out of Gib some years before when an ironclad grounded on this rock, but
was got off without more damage than a scraping. As the danger to the
navigation was outside the limits of the fortress, the British
authorities applied to the Spanish for permission to clear away the
obstruction. It was easily to be accomplished. A party of sappers could
set a caisson round it, bore a gallery, insert a charge, and blast the
rock into smithereens with safety and despatch. But the Spaniards would
not consent to such an interference with the designs of Providence; the
poor fishermen on the coast were often dependent for their livelihood on
what they could pick up from wrecks, and if this rock were removed
Nature would be sacrilegiously altered, and the interesting wreckers
deprived of many an honest coin. I tell the tale as it was told to me. I
wonder should it be dedicated to the amphibious corps.

Another story bearing on the successful revolution inaugurated by Prim
is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which
is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is
the same; the scene and the _dramatis personae_ are merely shifted. One
of the stereotyped military risings was to be initiated at Algeciras on
the arrival of Prim from England. The intimation that he was at hand was
to be made by the firing of two rockets from the ship which carried him.
On a certain night at the close of August, 1868, two rockets blazed in
the sky, and were noticed by the impatient conspirators at Algeciras,
who flew to arms to cries of "Down with the Queen," and "Live Prim and
Liberty." But no Prim landed. The alarm was premature, the rising a
flash in the pan. What they had taken for the bright herald of the
advent of "El Paladino" was the signal of a Peninsular and Oriental
steamer which had arrived on her passage to Port Said. For the sake of
appearances, a number of unfortunate fools were set up against a wall
and had their brains blown out in tribute to law and order. But the
fruit was ripening. Within little more than a fortnight came the
insurrection of the fleet at Cadiz, upon the appearance in that port of
the popular hero, and before the end of the month Queen Isabella had
fled over the French frontier, never to return to Spain as a sovereign.
Prim's plot was attended with a fortune in excess of his most sanguine
hopes; he entered Madrid in triu