The ride round the bay was so full of gracious, soothing beauty, that we soon forgot all the discomforts gone through before. The atmosphere of early morning is always delicious in the South; and, to-day, the pale blue bay, the green heights, the glistening white sands, the terraced city, and the grey rocks, seen through so transparent a medium, looked more like a reflexion of a beautiful scene than a scene itself.
We rode quite close to the water’s edge, and the musical plashing of the waves, and the sweetness and softness of the air, would have healed any weariness of flesh and spirit, I think. We were weary enough at starting, but had grown quite fresh and strong by the time we had reached the “Lines.”
The only drawback to this delightful ride was the garrulousness of my guide. The fat Spaniard had placed himself, with all the baggage, on his strongest horse, and led the way, looking the picture of slothful, self-indulgent nonchalance; my friend rode his second horse, comfortably mounted on a Spanish saddle; I followed on the little Englishman’s horse, a small, incapable beast, who had evidently been over-worked and ill-fed during the last few busy weeks.
There are some people, luckily very few, who inspire one with instinctive repugnance, and this little Englishman, as he called himself, was one. He was so small, freckled, and ugly, so conceited, and so envious of the big Spaniard, that he reminded one of the frog in Æsop’s fables, which tried to blow itself out to the size of the ox.
“Look at that fellow going there,” he said in his queer Gibraltar English, and pointing to his enemy; “he is the worst man in the world, and would as soon stick a knife into you as look at you. Just because I set up as horse-dealer and letter, he spites me so that he would kill me if he dared; but I’m an Englishman, and he just knows that he’d better keep his hands off me. He is as mad as a hornet because you English ladies employed me, although he hadn’t another horse in the world. When English travellers come to Algeciras, whom do you suppose they would employ, Señora, an Englishman or a Spaniard?”
“Why, I suppose they would pick the best horses,” I replied wickedly; “that is the most important point.”
He looked at his own poor brute a little ruefully. “I’d back my horse against any in Gibraltar when he is fresh,” he said, “but he went this same journey late last night, and has been hacking at it for days.”
“Precisely,” I answered, “he can only just put one foot before the other, and if the saddle hurts him as much as it does me, the sooner I get off the better for both of us.”
“Yes, I know the saddle goes badly,” he went on in the same aggrieved tone; “but it’s all that bad man’s fault. His saddle just fits Bobby here, and this one is just twice too big. I ran home and got the very pillows from under my wife’s head, who is ill of ague, but they slip off like nothing.”
“I’m sorry you robbed your wife of her pillows,” I said; “but, pillows or no pillows, my saddle is as uneven as a gridiron, whilst the Señora yonder rides as comfortably as possible.”