vening, a band plays,
and the Alameda is the resort of fashion and of nursery-maids.

Tarifa, shining in the sunset across the water, is a tempting morsel for
the landscape-painter, and the dwellers in Tarifa are the best teachers
of Spanish. A British subaltern bent on improving his mind could
encounter an infinitely better preceptor there than "Jingling Johnny,"
the self-appointed professor to the garrison, who hires himself on
Monday, makes you a present of a guitar-tutor on Tuesday, and asks you
to favour him with six months' payment in advance on Wednesday. To be
sure, the Spanish those Tarifans speak is slightly Arabified; but their
tones of voice are persuasive, and their methods of teaching agreeable.
The professor taken by the British subaltern is invariably a female, and
the females of Tarifa are not the ugliest in the world. They still
retain many customs peculiar to their Moorish ancestors. They wear a
manta, not a mantilla--a sort of large-hooded mantle, with which they
hide the light of their countenance, except an eye--but that is a
piercer, ye gods I and they keep it open for business. When a stranger
passes, especially if he looks like a sucking lieutenant from the
fortress beyond, the manta falls, disclosing the soft loveliness
beneath, and the wearer affects a pretty confusion, and hastens with
judicious slowness to re-adjust its folds. The British subaltern reels
to his quarters seriously wounded, and may be seen the following
morning, with his hair blown back, spouting poetry to the zephyrs on
Europa Point. Oh no!--that only occurs in romances; but he may be seen
drinking brandy-and-soda moderately in the Club-House.

Poor British subaltern! How Sutlersville does exploit him! He is a
sheep, and bears his fleecing without a kick. Watch those lazy,
lounging, able-bodied, smoking, and salivating loons who prop up every
street-corner, and monopolize the narrow pathways--these all live by
him; they eat up his substance, and fatten thereupon. These are the
touting and speculating sons of the Rock, the veritable Scorpions, who
are ever ready to find the "cap'n" a dog or a horse or a boat, or
something not so harmless, to help him on the road to ruin, and whisper
in his ear what a fine fellow he is--"As ver fine a fellow--real
gemman--as Lord Tomnoddy, who give me such a many dollars when he go
away." The first word these loons pronounce after coming into the world
must be _baksheesh_. They are born with b