not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small
house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it
dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course, it is an
artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the town in turn
lives upon the fortress.

The English plant themselves nowhere without gathering English
conveniences or conventions about them; Americans would not always think
them comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a hunt,
there is a lending library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is
bridge, there is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do
not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard,
because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they
will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf
links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the invaders as Gib,
and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn, though in summer it is
frightfully hot, held out on the knees and insteps of the rock to the
burning African sun, which comes up every morning over the sea after
setting Sahara on fire.

All this foreign life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life
which has so long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of
outlasting the English. I do not know what the occupations and
amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough.
There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the
two, which would form a curious inquiry, but Avould probably not lend
itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another
neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in
order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many
more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used