swathed in clouds. On our left were the granite-ribbed slopes of old Spain. The strait is only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part.

4. While we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the lowlands robed in misty gloom, a finer picture burst upon us and chained every eye like a magnet a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till she was one towering mass of bellying sail. She came speeding over the sea like a great bird. Africa and Spain were forgotten. All homage was for the beautiful stranger. While everybody gazed she swept superbly by and flung the stars and stripes to the breeze. Quicker than thought hats and handkerchiefs flashed in the air, and a cheer went up. She was beautiful before she was radiant now. Many a one on our decks knew then for the first time how tame a sight his country's flag is at home compared to what it is in a foreign land. To see it is to have a vision of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a very river of sluggish blood.

5. We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain with summit streaked with granite ledges, was in sight. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients did not have was very voluminous. In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the centre of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom.

6. The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, by fourteen hundred to fifteen hundred feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide at its base. One side and one end of it come about as straight up out of the sea as the side of a house; the other end is irregular, and the other side is a steep slant which an army would find it very difficult to climb. At the foot of this slant and occupying a part of it is the walled town of Gibraltar.

7. Everywhere on hillside, in the precipice, by the sea, on the heights-everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad with masonry and bristling with guns. Pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat narrow strip of land, it makes a striking and lively picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it. A few hundred yards of this flat ground at its base belongs to the English, and then, extending across the strip from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of a mile, comes the "neutral ground," a space two or three hundred yards wide, which is free to both parties.

8. "Are you going through Spain to Paris?" That question had been bandied about the ship, day and night, from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I could never get so tired of hearing any one combination of words again, or more tired of answering, "I don't know." At the last moment six or seven of our number had sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did go, and I felt a sense of relief at once; it was for ever too late, now, and I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

9. But behold how annoyances repeat themselves! We had no sooner got rid of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another, a tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about it even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English had not been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day, she would have had to break her oath or die up there."

10. We rode on mules up the steep narrow streets, and entered the subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock. Here, at short intervals, great guns frown out upon the sea and town, through portholes five or six hundred feet above the ocean. These guns command the peninsula and

the adjacent harbors. From the lofty portholes you get superb views of the sea. At one place, where a jutting crag was hollowed out into a great chamber, whose furniture was huge cannon, and whose windows were portholes, a glimpse was caught of a hill not far away, and a soldier said: “That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen of Spain placed her chair there once when "—et cætera, et cætera. 11. On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good while, and no doubt the mules were tired. They had a right to be. The military road was good, but rather steep, and there was a good deal of it. The view from the narrow ledge was magnificent; from it vessels seeming like tiniest little toyboats were turned into noble ships by the telescope, and other vessels that were fifty miles away, and even sixty, they said, and invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distinguished. Below, on one side, we looked down upon an endless mass of batteries, and on the other straight down to the sea.

12. While I was resting comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to another party came up and said: "That high hill yonder, sir, is called the Queen's Chair." 'Sir," said I, interrupting him—“sir, I am a helpless orphan, in a foreign land. Have pity on me. Don't-now don't-inflict that most tiresome old legend on me any more to-day."

MARK TWAIN.

viuer came by it, Heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk's shoulders, best knows; but it would have suited a Brahmin, and had I met it upon the plains of Hindostan, I had reverenced it. The rest of his outline may be given in a few strokes; one might put it into the hands of any one to design, for it was neither elegant nor otherwise but as character and expression made it so. It was a thin, spare form, something above the common size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forward in the figure; but it was the attitude of entreaty, and, as it now stands present in my imagination, it gained more than it lost by it.

3. When he had entered the room three paces, he stocd still,