is their God. They never do to-day what
they can leave till to-morrow. So worked
this mason, till, trying to make room for the
porters to pass, he let the plank he worked
on fall, and all but killed a covey of us; who,
however, with a little benediction of white-
wash, escaped.

At last, down the hot white lane, slowly
strolls the officer, swinging his keys upon his
brown forefinger. He greets us with a
stolid official look, and goes slowly to work.
He cannot understand hurry, and goes no
quicker, though a dozen portmanteaus, red
and green-badged, are opened round him, as
if the owners were showing him samples.
Some mariners kneel down, and slip their
hands between shirts and under-coats, smile,
nod their heads, and say, " Bueno—basta!"
and hand you your keys; but, if you have a
pomatum-pot that will not open, or a
tooth-powder-box that is screwed tight, woe betide
you.

All right! We are good! And so off we
go, following the moving carpet-bag
mountains to Blanco's. We find it at the corner of
the Alameda, facing the Hog Backs, rocks
that the surf buffets, and punishes, and
frothily raves about. It is a queer old
building, with cumbrous green balconies and
glass-door-windows; the lower windows
grated like a prison; the main entrance large
as that of a coach-house, and opening to a
white-washed court with a banana tree in
a tub to cast abroad and project its green
arches. I find my room one of a set of five,
situated faraway, not up the great central
stair-case, but in a sort of distant wing, got to
through passages and up dark steps, all looking
down on the great upstart banana that
thrusts its plumes almost to the roof. As I go
up, I pass a sort of stalled lumber-room full
of dry white maize husks, and I think, with a
nervous twinge, especially as it is close to
my bed-room door, of a careless Dolores
dropping a spark into this gunpowder
magazine. Everywhere about on the
white-washed walls is a black, tangled rigging of
loose bell-wires, going and coming no one
knows where, for no room, after all, seems to
have a bell; nor is there one at the entrance.
I pass, too, a red-curtained room, where the
hotel laundress and some girls are laughing,
sewing, and nursing brown babies, as yet
innocent of garlic or cigars, guitar-playing
or stabbing. My five rooms are some of
them without windows, and resemble
condemned cells. The floors are matted, and the
doors shut only by bolting. They are of the
age of Wamba, and are plated with iron, as
if a sort of siege of Saragossa or war to the
knife had gone on at some time or other
there during the old times. My door, too, has
a nun's gridiron wicket, through which I
shout for my boots or water for shaving;
and, when I thus call steadily for twenty
minutes, up comes a little dirty Jew man, in
a white waistcoat and nauseous shirt—who
has generally not heard me, but looked in by
chance to tell me about the boats to
Marseilles. He talks that peculiar negro-English
common to Spaniards, as thus: "Good morning,
sar! You want change for three
Isabels? I bring you change, sar. You want
Amontillado? I no got Amontillado; but
wait, wait, I get you very good wine from
Xeres. How you like Cadiz, sar? How
you like beautiful bay? O, bay vary beautiful,
sar! An English lord marquis say to me,
'I have seen all the bays as ever will be; but
I never shall or will see a bay like your
beautiful bay, Blanco.'"

When I go down to dinner, and find my
way to the table d'hôte room, like Ulysses,
after many wanderings, looking down, as I
pass, at the hall, at a pretty Creole-
looking girl playing at red-pipped cards
with an infant Blanco, who keeps sweeping
them all into his pinbefore, and roaring again
with hysteric joy as Maraquita or Catarina
pounces him up and smothers him with
laughing kisses. I enter the doorless room,
which opens on an inner well-court, and find
the company assembled in a long blank-looking
hall leading to the kitchen; which hisses at
us as if we were acting an unsuccessful
comedy.

The walls are hung with bright coloured
hard pictures of still life; melons like green
washing-basins, mashy figs, metallic-looking
fish, and stewpans shining like coppery
mirrors. The Blanco servants are dining behind
a screen at the lower end of the hall, and
Blanco—who is like Scott's Black Dwarf—
waits on us, rubbing his dirty hands and
entering freely into conversation about
bull-fights, money-changing, trains, and
steam-boats. Opposite to me, on rush-bottomed
chairs, sit a veteran looking Spaniard and a
lady, who keeps performing dentistic
researches with a tooth-pick. A new arrival from
Gibraltar hot and uneasy, and with a dreadful
consciousness of being a parvenu at a
board where the oldest of us is only of two
days' standing, fires snap-shot questions at
me as to whether the wine is good, and if
Blanco's can be called a first-rate hotel, and
is frequented by the tip-tops: he gradually
warms to narration of his sufferings in the
Bay of Biscay, garrison news of Gib, and
details of ministerial difficulties. He is going
on to inuendoes against the tooth-pick lady,
but is stopped by a cynical glance of our
chairman, Mr. Malmesbury, the English
merchant, who will not condescend to talk
to anyone but the two Spaniards, and watches
us with an insolent-looking stare and a sullen
reserve that rather heats my blood. It is
astonishing how soon an Englishman gets
Spanishised. I saw too many instances of
how soon that subtle, demoralising climate
saps the English pluck and energy, and
reduces a man to the languid, lounging, smoking,
idle, procrastinating Spaniard; whose
energy is fitful, Eastern, and passionate,