<h2> <SPAN name="ch6" id="ch6">CHAPTER VI.</SPAN> </h2>
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<p>I think the Azores must be very little known in America. Out of our whole
ship's company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything
whatever about them. Some of the party, well read concerning most other
lands, had no other information about the Azores than that they were a
group of nine or ten small islands far out in the Atlantic, something more
than halfway between New York and Gibraltar. That was all. These
considerations move me to put in a paragraph of dry facts just here.</p>
<p>The community is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow,
poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by
the King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme
control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands
contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese.
Everything is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred years old
when Columbus discovered America. The principal crop is corn, and they
raise it and grind it just as their great-great-great-grandfathers did.
They plow with a board slightly shod with iron; their trifling little
harrows are drawn by men and women; small windmills grind the corn, ten
bushels a day, and there is one assistant superintendent to feed the mill
and a general superintendent to stand by and keep him from going to sleep.
When the wind changes they hitch on some donkeys and actually turn the
whole upper half of the mill around until the sails are in proper
position, instead of fixing the concern so that the sails could be moved
instead of the mill. Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after the fashion
prevalent in the time of Methuselah. There is not a wheelbarrow in the
land—they carry everything on their heads, or on donkeys, or in a
wicker-bodied cart, whose wheels are solid blocks of wood and whose axles
turn with the wheel. There is not a modern plow in the islands or a
threshing machine. All attempts to introduce them have failed. The good
Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him from all
blasphemous desire to know more than his father did before him. The
climate is mild; they never have snow or ice, and I saw no chimneys in the
town. The donkeys and the men, women, and children of a family all eat and
sleep in the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged by vermin, and are
truly happy. The people lie, and cheat the stranger, and are desperately
ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their dead. The latter trait
shows how little better they are than the donkeys they eat and sleep with.
The only well-dressed Portuguese in the camp are the half a dozen
well-to-do families, the Jesuit priests, and the soldiers of the little
garrison. The wages of a laborer are twenty to twenty-four cents a day,
and those of a good mechanic about twice as much. They count it in reis at
a thousand to the dollar, and this makes them rich and contented. Fine
grapes used to grow in the islands, and an excellent wine was made and
exported. But a disease killed all the vines fifteen years ago, and since
that time no wine has been made. The islands being wholly of volcanic
origin, the soil is necessarily very rich. Nearly every foot of ground is
under cultivation, and two or three crops a year of each article are
produced, but nothing is exported save a few oranges—chiefly to
England. Nobody comes here, and nobody goes away. News is a thing unknown
in Fayal. A thirst for it is a passion equally unknown. A Portuguese of
average intelligence inquired if our civil war was over. Because, he said,
somebody had told him it was—or at least it ran in his mind that
somebody had told him something like that! And when a passenger gave an
officer of the garrison copies of the Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he
was surprised to find later news in them from Lisbon than he had just
received by the little monthly steamer. He was told that it came by cable.
He said he knew they had tried to lay a cable ten years ago, but it had
been in his mind somehow that they hadn't succeeded!</p>
<p>It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes. We
visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a
piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified. It was
polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if the
dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen
centuries ago. But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood
unhesitatingly.</p>
<p>In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver—at
least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred
to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)—and
before it is kept forever burning a small lamp. A devout lady who died,
left money and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul,
and also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and
night. She did all this before she died, you understand. It is a very
small lamp and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I
think, if it went out altogether.</p>
<p>The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a
perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread. And they have a swarm of
rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some on
one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and some
with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left to blow—all
of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the hospital
than the cathedral.</p>
<p>The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over with figures
of almost life size, very elegantly wrought and dressed in the fanciful
costumes of two centuries ago. The design was a history of something or
somebody, but none of us were learned enough to read the story. The old
father, reposing under a stone close by, dated 1686, might have told us if
he could have risen. But he didn't.</p>
<p>As we came down through the town we encountered a squad of little donkeys
ready saddled for use. The saddles were peculiar, to say the least. They
consisted of a sort of saw-buck with a small mattress on it, and this
furniture covered about half the donkey. There were no stirrups, but
really such supports were not needed—to use such a saddle was the
next thing to riding a dinner table—there was ample support clear
out to one's knee joints. A pack of ragged Portuguese muleteers crowded
around us, offering their beasts at half a dollar an hour—more
rascality to the stranger, for the market price is sixteen cents. Half a
dozen of us mounted the ungainly affairs and submitted to the indignity of
making a ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets
of a town of 10,000 inhabitants.</p>
<p>We started. It was not a trot, a gallop, or a canter, but a stampede, and
made up of all possible or conceivable gaits. No spurs were necessary.
There was a muleteer to every donkey and a dozen volunteers beside, and
they banged the donkeys with their goad sticks, and pricked them with
their spikes, and shouted something that sounded like "Sekki-yah!" and
kept up a din and a racket that was worse than Bedlam itself. These
rascals were all on foot, but no matter, they were always up to time—they
can outrun and outlast a donkey. Altogether, ours was a lively and a
picturesque procession, and drew crowded audiences to the balconies
wherever we went.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Blucher could do nothing at all with his donkey. The beast scampered
zigzag across the road and the others ran into him; he scraped Blucher
against carts and the corners of houses; the road was fenced in with high
stone walls, and the donkey gave him a polishing first on one side and
then on the other, but never once took the middle; he finally came to the
house he was born in and darted into the parlor, scraping Blucher off at
the doorway. After remounting, Blucher said to the muleteer, "Now, that's
enough, you know; you go slow hereafter."</p>
<p>But the fellow knew no English and did not understand, so he simply said,
"Sekki-yah!" and the donkey was off again like a shot. He turned a corner
suddenly, and Blucher went over his head. And, to speak truly, every mule
stumbled over the two, and the whole cavalcade was piled up in a heap. No
harm done. A fall from one of those donkeys is of little more consequence
than rolling off a sofa. The donkeys all stood still after the catastrophe
and waited for their dismembered saddles to be patched up and put on by
the noisy muleteers. Blucher was pretty angry and wanted to swear, but
every time he opened his mouth his animal did so also and let off a series
of brays that drowned all other sounds.</p>
<p>It was fun, scurrying around the breezy hills and through the beautiful
canyons. There was that rare thing, novelty, about it; it was a fresh,
new, exhilarating sensation, this donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn
and threadbare home pleasures.</p>
<p>The roads were a wonder, and well they might be. Here was an island with
only a handful of people in it—25,000—and yet such fine roads
do not exist in the United States outside of Central Park. Everywhere you
go, in any direction, you find either a hard, smooth, level thoroughfare,
just sprinkled with black lava sand, and bordered with little gutters
neatly paved with small smooth pebbles, or compactly paved ones like
Broadway. They talk much of the Russ pavement in New York, and call it a
new invention—yet here they have been using it in this remote little
isle of the sea for two hundred years! Every street in Horta is handsomely
paved with the heavy Russ blocks, and the surface is neat and true as a
floor—not marred by holes like Broadway. And every road is fenced in
by tall, solid lava walls, which will last a thousand years in this land
where frost is unknown. They are very thick, and are often plastered and
whitewashed and capped with projecting slabs of cut stone. Trees from
gardens above hang their swaying tendrils down, and contrast their bright
green with the whitewash or the black lava of the walls and make them
beautiful. The trees and vines stretch across these narrow roadways
sometimes and so shut out the sun that you seem to be riding through a
tunnel. The pavements, the roads, and the bridges are all government work.</p>
<p>The bridges are of a single span—a single arch—of cut stone,
without a support, and paved on top with flags of lava and ornamental
pebblework. Everywhere are walls, walls, walls, and all of them tasteful
and handsome—and eternally substantial; and everywhere are those
marvelous pavements, so neat, so smooth, and so indestructible. And if
ever roads and streets and the outsides of houses were perfectly free from
any sign or semblance of dirt, or dust, or mud, or uncleanliness of any
kind, it is Horta, it is Fayal. The lower classes of the people, in their
persons and their domiciles, are not clean—but there it stops—the
town and the island are miracles of cleanliness.</p>
<p>We arrived home again finally, after a ten-mile excursion, and the
irrepressible muleteers scampered at our heels through the main street,
goading the donkeys, shouting the everlasting "Sekki-yah," and singing
"John Brown's Body" in ruinous English.</p>
<p>When we were dismounted and it came to settling, the shouting and jawing
and swearing and quarreling among the muleteers and with us was nearly
deafening. One fellow would demand a dollar an hour for the use of his
donkey; another claimed half a dollar for pricking him up, another a
quarter for helping in that service, and about fourteen guides presented
bills for showing us the way through the town and its environs; and every
vagrant of them was more vociferous, and more vehement and more frantic in
gesture than his neighbor. We paid one guide and paid for one muleteer to
each donkey.</p>
<p>The mountains on some of the islands are very high. We sailed along the
shore of the island of Pico, under a stately green pyramid that rose up
with one unbroken sweep from our very feet to an altitude of 7,613 feet,
and thrust its summit above the white clouds like an island adrift in a
fog!</p>
<p>We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc., in these
Azores, of course. But I will desist. I am not here to write Patent Office
reports.</p>
<p>We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five or six days out
from the Azores.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<h2> <SPAN name="ch7" id="ch7">CHAPTER VII.</SPAN> </h2>
<p>A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of
seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with
spray—spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thick
with a white crust of salt to their very tops; a week of shivering in the
shelter of the lifeboats and deckhouses by day and blowing suffocating
"clouds" and boisterously performing at dominoes in the smoking room at
night.</p>
<p>And the last night of the seven was the stormiest of all. There was no
thunder, no noise but the pounding bows of the ship, the keen whistling of
the gale through the cordage, and the rush of the seething waters. But the
vessel climbed aloft as if she would climb to heaven—then paused an
instant that seemed a century and plunged headlong down again, as from a
precipice. The sheeted sprays drenched the decks like rain. The blackness
of darkness was everywhere. At long intervals a flash of lightning clove
it with a quivering line of fire that revealed a heaving world of water
where was nothing before, kindled the dusky cordage to glittering silver,
and lit up the faces of the men with a ghastly luster!</p>
<p>Fear drove many on deck that were used to avoiding the night winds and the
spray. Some thought the vessel could not live through the night, and it
seemed less dreadful to stand out in the midst of the wild tempest and see
the peril that threatened than to be shut up in the sepulchral cabins,
under the dim lamps, and imagine the horrors that were abroad on the
ocean. And once out—once where they could see the ship struggling in
the strong grasp of the storm—once where they could hear the shriek
of the winds and face the driving spray and look out upon the majestic
picture the lightnings disclosed, they were prisoners to a fierce
fascination they could not resist, and so remained. It was a wild night—and
a very, very long one.</p>
<p>Everybody was sent scampering to the deck at seven o'clock this lovely
morning of the thirtieth of June with the glad news that land was in
sight! It was a rare thing and a joyful, to see all the ship's family
abroad once more, albeit the happiness that sat upon every countenance
could only partly conceal the ravages which that long siege of storms had
wrought there. But dull eyes soon sparkled with pleasure, pallid cheeks
flushed again, and frames weakened by sickness gathered new life from the
quickening influences of the bright, fresh morning. Yea, and from a still
more potent influence: the worn castaways were to see the blessed land
again!—and to see it was to bring back that motherland that was in
all their thoughts.</p>
<p>Within the hour we were fairly within the Straits of Gibraltar, the tall
yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, with their bases veiled in
a blue haze and their summits swathed in clouds—the same being
according to Scripture, which says that "clouds and darkness are over the
land." The words were spoken of this particular portion of Africa, I
believe. On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain. The
strait is only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part.</p>
<p>At short intervals along the Spanish shore were quaint-looking old stone
towers—Moorish, we thought—but learned better afterwards. In
former times the Morocco rascals used to coast along the Spanish Main in
their boats till a safe opportunity seemed to present itself, and then
dart in and capture a Spanish village and carry off all the pretty women
they could find. It was a pleasant business, and was very popular. The
Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them to keep a
sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators.</p>
<p>The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes weary of the
changeless sea, and by and by the ship's company grew wonderfully
cheerful. But 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 see a vision of
home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a very
river of sluggish blood!<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>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 other, the great Rock of Gibraltar, was yet to
come. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of
navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't
have was very voluminous. Even the prophets wrote book after book and
epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great
continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there,
I should think.</p>
<p>In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in
the center 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.</p>
<p>The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I should say, by
1,400 to 1,500 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 very difficult to climb. At the foot of
this slant is the walled town of Gibraltar—or rather the town
occupies part of the slant. 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. It makes a
striking and lively picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it. It
is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and
is suggestive of a "gob" of mud on the end of a shingle. 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.<br/> <br/>
<br/></p>
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<p>"Are you going through Spain to Paris?" That question was bandied about
the ship day and night from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I never
could 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 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 forever 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.</p>
<p>But behold how annoyances repeat themselves. We had no sooner gotten 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 hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag
for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up
there."</p>
<p>We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the
subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock. These
galleries are like spacious railway tunnels, and at short intervals in
them great guns frown out upon sea and town through portholes five or six
hundred feet above the ocean. There is a mile or so of this subterranean
work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor. The gallery
guns command the peninsula and the harbors of both oceans, but they might
as well not be there, I should think, for an army could hardly climb the
perpendicular wall of the rock anyhow. Those lofty portholes afford superb
views of the sea, though. 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:</p>
<p>"That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen
of Spain placed her chair there once 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 hadn't
been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day, she'd have
had to break her oath or die up there."<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>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 the tiniest
little toy boats were turned into noble ships by the telescopes, and other
vessels that were fifty miles away and even sixty, they said, and
invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distinguished through those
same telescopes. Below, on one side, we looked down upon an endless mass
of batteries and on the other straight down to the sea.</p>
<p>While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my
baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to
another party came up and said:</p>
<p>"Senor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair—"</p>
<p>"Sir, I am a helpless orphan in a foreign land. Have pity on me. Don't—now
don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!"</p>
<p>There—I had used strong language after promising I would never do so
again; but the provocation was more than human nature could bear. If you
had been bored so, when you had the noble panorama of Spain and Africa and
the blue Mediterranean spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze and
enjoy and surfeit yourself in its beauty in silence, you might have even
burst into stronger language than I did.</p>
<p>Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them of nearly four
years' duration (it failed), and the English only captured it by
stratagem. The wonder is that anybody should ever dream of trying so
impossible a project as the taking it by assault—and yet it has been
tried more than once.</p>
<p>The Moors held the place twelve hundred years ago, and a staunch old
castle of theirs of that date still frowns from the middle of the town,
with moss-grown battlements and sides well scarred by shots fired in
battles and sieges that are forgotten now. A secret chamber in the rock
behind it was discovered some time ago, which contained a sword of
exquisite workmanship, and some quaint old armor of a fashion that
antiquaries are not acquainted with, though it is supposed to be Roman.
Roman armor and Roman relics of various kinds have been found in a cave in
the sea extremity of Gibraltar; history says Rome held this part of the
country about the Christian era, and these things seem to confirm the
statement.</p>
<p>In that cave also are found human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony
coating, and wise men have ventured to say that those men not only lived
before the flood, but as much as ten thousand years before it. It may be
true—it looks reasonable enough—but as long as those parties
can't vote anymore, the matter can be of no great public interest. In this
cave likewise are found skeletons and fossils of animals that exist in
every part of Africa, yet within memory and tradition have never existed
in any portion of Spain save this lone peak of Gibraltar! So the theory is
that the channel between Gibraltar and Africa was once dry land, and that
the low, neutral neck between Gibraltar and the Spanish hills behind it
was once ocean, and of course that these African animals, being over at
Gibraltar (after rock, perhaps—there is plenty there), got closed
out when the great change occurred. The hills in Africa, across the
channel, are full of apes, and there are now and always have been apes on
the rock of Gibraltar—but not elsewhere in Spain! The subject is an
interesting one.</p>
<p>There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 men, and so
uniforms of flaming red are plenty; and red and blue, and undress costumes
of snowy white, and also the queer uniform of the bare-kneed Highlander;
and one sees soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, and veiled Moorish
beauties (I suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and turbaned, sashed,
and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez, and long-robed, bare-legged,
ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and Tangier, some brown, some
yellow and some as black as virgin ink—and Jews from all around, in
gabardine, skullcap, and slippers, just as they are in pictures and
theaters, and just as they were three thousand years ago, no doubt. You
can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims suggest that
expression, because they march in a straggling procession through these
foreign places with such an Indian-like air of complacency and
independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen or sixteen states
of the Union, found enough to stare at in this shifting panorama of
fashion today.</p>
<p>Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among
us who are sometimes an annoyance. However, I do not count the Oracle in
that list. I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats
for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any
right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a
longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long
word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will serenely
venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up
complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally
when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has
been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken
arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your very
teeth as original with himself. He reads a chapter in the guidebooks,
mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict
the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his brain
for years and which he gathered in college from erudite authors who are
dead now and out of print. This morning at breakfast he pointed out of the
window and said:</p>
<p>"Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast? It's one of
them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say—and there's the ultimate one
alongside of it."</p>
<p>"The ultimate one—that is a good word—but the pillars are not
both on the same side of the strait." (I saw he had been deceived by a
carelessly written sentence in the guidebook.)<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>"Well, it ain't for you to say, nor for me. Some authors states it that
way, and some states it different. Old Gibbons don't say nothing about it—just
shirks it complete—Gibbons always done that when he got stuck—but
there is Rolampton, what does he say? Why, he says that they was both on
the same side, and Trinculian, and Sobaster, and Syraccus, and
Langomarganbl——"</p>
<p>"Oh, that will do—that's enough. If you have got your hand in for
inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing more to say—let them
be on the same side."</p>
<p>We don't mind the Oracle. We rather like him. We can tolerate the Oracle
very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot on
board, and they do distress the company. The one gives copies of his
verses to consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch—to
anybody, in fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly
meant. His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwithstanding when he
wrote an "Ode to the Ocean in a Storm" in one half hour, and an
"Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the
transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an
invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in
chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the
Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers.</p>
<p>The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, and not bright,
not learned, and not wise. He will be, though, someday if he recollects
the answers to all his questions. He is known about the ship as the
"Interrogation Point," and this by constant use has become shortened to
"Interrogation." He has distinguished himself twice already. In Fayal they
pointed out a hill and told him it was 800 feet high and 1,100 feet long.
And they told him there was a tunnel 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet high
running through the hill, from end to end. He believed it. He repeated it
to everybody, discussed it, and read it from his notes. Finally, he took a
useful hint from this remark, which a thoughtful old pilgrim made:</p>
<p>"Well, yes, it is a little remarkable—singular tunnel altogether—stands
up out of the top of the hill about two hundred feet, and one end of it
sticks out of the hill about nine hundred!"<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Here in Gibraltar he corners these educated British officers and badgers
them with braggadocio about America and the wonders she can perform! He
told one of them a couple of our gunboats could come here and knock
Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea!</p>
<p>At this present moment half a dozen of us are taking a private pleasure
excursion of our own devising. We form rather more than half the list of
white passengers on board a small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish
town of Tangier, Africa. Nothing could be more absolutely certain than
that we are enjoying ourselves. One can not do otherwise who speeds over
these sparkling waters and breathes the soft atmosphere of this sunny
land. Care cannot assail us here. We are out of its jurisdiction.</p>
<p>We even steamed recklessly by the frowning fortress of Malabat (a
stronghold of the Emperor of Morocco) without a twinge of fear. The whole
garrison turned out under arms and assumed a threatening attitude—yet
still we did not fear. The entire garrison marched and counter-marched
within the rampart, in full view—yet notwithstanding even this, we
never flinched.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I suppose we really do not know what fear is. I inquired the name of the
garrison of the fortress of Malabat, and they said it was Mehemet Ali Ben
Sancom. I said it would be a good idea to get some more garrisons to help
him; but they said no, he had nothing to do but hold the place, and he was
competent to do that, had done it two years already. That was evidence
which one could not well refute. There is nothing like reputation.</p>
<p>Every now and then my glove purchase in Gibraltar last night intrudes
itself upon me. Dan and the ship's surgeon and I had been up to the great
square, listening to the music of the fine military bands and
contemplating English and Spanish female loveliness and fashion, and at
nine o'clock were on our way to the theater, when we met the General, the
Judge, the Commodore, the Colonel, and the Commissioner of the United
States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa, who had been to the Club
House to register their several titles and impoverish the bill of fare;
and they told us to go over to the little variety store near the Hall of
Justice and buy some kid gloves. They said they were elegant and very
moderate in price. It seemed a stylish thing to go to the theater in kid
gloves, and we acted upon the hint. A very handsome young lady in the
store offered me a pair of blue gloves. I did not want blue, but she said
they would look very pretty on a hand like mine. The remark touched me
tenderly. I glanced furtively at my hand, and somehow it did seem rather a
comely member. I tried a glove on my left and blushed a little. Manifestly
the size was too small for me. But I felt gratified when she said:</p>
<p>"Oh, it is just right!" Yet I knew it was no such thing.</p>
<p>I tugged at it diligently, but it was discouraging work. She said:</p>
<p>"Ah! I see you are accustomed to wearing kid gloves—but some
gentlemen are so awkward about putting them on."</p>
<p>It was the last compliment I had expected. I only understand putting on
the buckskin article perfectly. I made another effort and tore the glove
from the base of the thumb into the palm of the hand—and tried to
hide the rent. She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination
to deserve them or die:</p>
<p>"Ah, you have had experience! [A rip down the back of the hand.] They are
just right for you—your hand is very small—if they tear you
need not pay for them. [A rent across the middle.] I can always tell when
a gentleman understands putting on kid gloves. There is a grace about it
that only comes with long practice." The whole after-guard of the glove
"fetched away," as the sailors say, the fabric parted across the knuckles,
and nothing was left but a melancholy ruin.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I was too much flattered to make an exposure and throw the merchandise on
the angel's hands. I was hot, vexed, confused, but still happy; but I
hated the other boys for taking such an absorbing interest in the
proceedings. I wished they were in Jericho. I felt exquisitely mean when I
said cheerfully:</p>
<p>"This one does very well; it fits elegantly. I like a glove that fits. No,
never mind, ma'am, never mind; I'll put the other on in the street. It is
warm here."</p>
<p>It was warm. It was the warmest place I ever was in. I paid the bill, and
as I passed out with a fascinating bow I thought I detected a light in the
woman's eye that was gently ironical; and when I looked back from the
street, and she was laughing all to herself about something or other, I
said to myself with withering sarcasm, "Oh, certainly; you know how to put
on kid gloves, don't you? A self-complacent ass, ready to be flattered out
of your senses by every petticoat that chooses to take the trouble to do
it!"</p>
<p>The silence of the boys annoyed me. Finally Dan said musingly:</p>
<p>"Some gentlemen don't know how to put on kid gloves at all, but some do."</p>
<p>And the doctor said (to the moon, I thought):</p>
<p>"But it is always easy to tell when a gentleman is used to putting on kid
gloves."</p>
<p>Dan soliloquized after a pause:</p>
<p>"Ah, yes; there is a grace about it that only comes with long, very long
practice."</p>
<p>"Yes, indeed, I've noticed that when a man hauls on a kid glove like he
was dragging a cat out of an ash hole by the tail, he understands putting
on kid gloves; he's had ex—"</p>
<p>"Boys, enough of a thing's enough! You think you are very smart, I
suppose, but I don't. And if you go and tell any of those old gossips in
the ship about this thing, I'll never forgive you for it; that's all."</p>
<p>They let me alone then for the time being. We always let each other alone
in time to prevent ill feeling from spoiling a joke. But they had bought
gloves, too, as I did. We threw all the purchases away together this
morning. They were coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with broad
yellow splotches, and could neither stand wear nor public exhibition. We
had entertained an angel unawares, but we did not take her in. She did
that for us.</p>
<p>Tangier! A tribe of stalwart Moors are wading into the sea to carry us
ashore on their backs from the small boats.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>
<br/></p>
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