Soldier--Marks of the Broad Arrow--The "Scorpions"--The
Jaunting-Cars--Amusements on the Bock--Mrs. Damages' Complaint--The
Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--How to Learn Spanish--Types of the
British Officer--The Wily Ben Solomon--A Word for the
Subaltern--Sunset Gun--The Sameness of Sutlersville.

WHERE I went to school, we had a droll lad, whose humour developed
itself in mispronunciation. In my nonage I considered that unique. Now I
know it is a rather common order of quaintness. Hugh used to call Sierra
Leone, "Sarah Alone;" Cambodia, "Gamboge;" Stromboli, "Storm-boiler;"
and Gibraltar, "Gabriel Tar." How we used to wrinkle with laughter at
his sallies, launched with an artistically unconscious air, until the
swooping cane came swishing down on our backs! And here I was in Gabriel
Tar. I vow the first inclination I felt was to write to Hugh with the
date engraved on the note-paper, and indeed so I should have done, but
that I had not seen him for nigh twenty years, and when last I heard of
him he was married, and had learned to be serious and to speak with
precision. The fun had been driven out of him by responsibility.
Propriety had come with prosperity.

Call it by what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that
infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is
supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a
bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is
welcome to take it--when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is
the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a
stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his
girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who is too surly to
barter his trust for gold. So Gabriel Tar will remain intact, until the
porter grows feeble or falls asleep.

British Spain, or "the Rock," or Gib, as it is indifferently termed, or
Sutlersville, as I prefer to name it, can be converted into an island at
the will of its defenders. The sandy spit of Neutral Ground at one side
of which Tommy Atkins, fresh-faced, does his sentry-go in brick-red
tunic and white pith-helmet, and at the other side of which swarthy
Sancho Panza y Toro, in projecting cap and long blue coat, fondles a
rifle in the bend of his arm, can readily be flooded; and the bare,
sheer, lofty north front, with scores of cannon of the deadliest modern
pattern lying in wait behind the irreg