documents the place is styled "Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great
Britain," and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun
no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also
mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a vear, and many people
living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses
that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its
pathos, but as a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make
that road through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that
our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes almost
flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always extended toward us.
They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones
recognized the _bouffe_ qtiality of their calling. One pleasant
starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in
his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the
spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given
nothing.

A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached,
and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief
public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of
examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an American
frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long
javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among
the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that
town are closed every day at nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife,
and everybody is shut either in or out, it may easily happen with
shoppers in haste to get through that they bring dutiable goods into
Spain; but the official javelins rectify the error.

We left our belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in