“My name is little Jock Eliott, and wha’ daur meddle wi’ me?”

Wilkinson, chuckling grimly, repeated it, surmised that “per’aps ’ee did,” and gave this parting anecdote:

When, after peace was declared, the French commander, Duc de Crillon, visited Gibraltar, Eliott showed him Ince’s galleries. De Crillon called the attention of his suite with these words:

“Notice, gentlemen, that these works are worthy of the Romans.”

(Shade of Scipio Africanus! didst hear and wert appeased?)

While in the Gunner’s company we heard much rolling of drums and sounding of “tuckets”; some military business was going on not far away. It was stirring to the pulses, and made us feel martial and bloodthirsty. We parted with the Gunner at evening gunfire; when we shook hands my bones crunched in his mighty grip, but I believe I did not flinch. We marched back to the hotel, keeping step to the march a military band was playing in the Alameda. That night, just as the floor of my room at the Cecil began to heave with the slow even roll of the Kaiser, a strain of sleepy lullaby music melted into my dream. I roused and looked at the watch. It was ten o’clock; the bugler at the barracks was playing “taps” on a silver bugle. It was all true! We were here, sleeping in the “Key to the Mediterranean!”

II
A SIBYL OF RONDA

DAWN€ in a garden of Andalusia.... To the south, across the Straits of Gibraltar, the faint purple outlines of the Atlas Mountains mark the mysterious coast of Africa. To the north, beyond the green vega, four ranges of clear cut Sierras Gazoulos rise, one behind the other, from gray, vaporous valleys of mist. The only sounds are the rhythmic breaking of waves on the beach; the short breathing of a herd of goats—black, tawny, and white, with coarse hair and fierce, yellow eyes, and the crisp crunch, crunch of their teeth cropping the roadside grass. The night flowers hang their heads and go to sleep, the day flowers lift their faces to the sun; the smell of heliotrope drenched in dew is an unforgetable thing. Breakfast is memorable, too; dates from Morocco, and rich Spanish coffee flavored with cinnamon, served under an arbor of Marechal Neil roses.

So began our first day in Spain, at a place the Romans called Portus Albus, and the Moors—they settled here soon after landing on Gibraltar, Jezirat-I-Kadra—“the green island.” Can you derive the modern name of Algeciras from that? You must. Our old friend Tarik was here,—witness the great aqueduct he built, that still brings Algeciras his royal gift of water, always the legacy of Roman or of Moor.

To-day, Gibraltar is England’s key to the Mediterranean; yesterday, Algeciras was the Moors’ key to Spain. They held the Peninsula seven hundred years, think of it!—nearly twice as long as white men have held America; then it was wrenched from them, the door was locked against them. Less than three hundred years ago our ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock, but how should we, in New England, feel if the Indians, the Mexicans, or the Canadians rose up and drove us out of our stately cities, our green pastures, our fertile wheat fields? The Moors made a brave stand at Algeciras—it was their last ditch—and put up a good fight here. In the year 1344, the town was besieged by Alonzo XI of Castile, with the help of crusaders from every part of Christendom. The siege lasted twenty months. Chaucer, writing forty years later, describes a true knight as one who “had fought at Algecir,” as we might say of one of Thermopylæ’s Three Hundred or of Balaclava’s Six Hundred. In 1760, four hundred years afterwards, the Spanish King, Charles III, rebuilt and fortified the place, “to be a hornet’s nest against the English.” For one hundred years Gibraltar and Algeciras—now deadly places, both of them bristling with guns, full of dynamite—have glowered at each other across the bay. The other day the English came again to Algeciras. Armed this time with British capital, they have built one of the hotels of the world here, and called it the Reina Maria Cristina, as a compliment to the Spanish Queen Mother.