ular embrasures that grimly pit
its surface, hardly invites attack. It frowns a calm but determined
defiance; and even the Cid himself might be excused if he turned on his
heel and puffed a meditative cigarette after he had surveyed it.

British Spain is small, being but one and seven-eighth square miles
English in area; but it is mighty strong. The population, comprising the
garrison, is less than fifteen thousand; but behind that slender cipher
of souls are the millions of the broadest and biggest of empires. I do
not know what the population of the cemetery is, but it receives rapid
and numerous accessions at each periodical outbreak of cholera. I paid a
visit to it--I have a fondness for sauntering in God's acre--and arrived
in time to witness a funeral. When the coffin was laid in the grave, a
young man, probably the husband of the deceased, threw himself prone on
the turf beside the open burial-trench, and burst into such a passionate
tempest of heart-rending sobs and moans and wailings, that I had to move
away. These Southerners are more demonstrative in their grief than the
men of the North. I question if their sorrows spring from deeper depths,
or are so lasting. The caretaker of the cemetery, an elderly Tipperary
soldier, with a short _dudheen_ in his mouth, was seated smoking on a
head-stone by a goat-willow. We got into conversation.

"There were worse places than Gib--singing-birds were raysonable here,
and some of them had rayl beautiful plumage."

My countryman, like the Duke of Argyll, had a weakness for ornithology.

"That spread of land beyant was where the races were held, and small-arm
parties from the fleet sometimes kem ashore and practised there. They
used to play cricket there, too. The symmetry wasn't a gay place, but
there were worse. There were some beautiful tombs--now _there_ was a
parable ov wan; 'twas put up by their frinds to some officers who were
dhrownded while they were crossing a flooded sthrame on their way back
from a shooting excursion. The car-drivers, who were dhrownded wid them,
had no monument. 'Twas a quare world; a poor man had the chance of dying
wid a rich man, but was not to be berrid in his company. Well, he
supposed it was for the best," and here he hammered the heel-tap out of
his pipe on the side of his shoe; "when the last bugle sounded a
field-officer would feel uncomfortable like if he had to be looking for
his bones in the same plot wid a lance-corporal."

Tru