ry.
I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the
Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to
remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series
of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is
a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with
a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who
live in agreeable little houses, with _patios_ open to the passer, and
with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously
closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas
and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in
the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas
bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he
sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane
trees dropping round them in the still air.

The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next
our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and
faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train
usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not
know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about,
empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if
they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently
attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine
and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The
Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside
sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with
the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and
have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of
wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which
were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar. I
myself only carried in books which after the first few declarations were
recognized as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial tolerance,
as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw feeling the persons of their
fellow-Spaniards unsparingly over.

We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras than in
Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly every afternoon, and
wantonly bought things. By this means we proved that the Andalusian
shopmen had