of empty chairs at the table and on deck are rather depressing, but
as the weather brightens a little people creep out of their cabins;
white-faced ladies come to lie, rolled in rugs, on the sheltered side of
the deck, and the chairs are filled. Yet it is still a little dismal,
though we tramp sturdily up and down and would not admit it for the
world. The strong wind blows endlessly and the great grey waves are
always rolling on monotonously one after another, one after another, in
huge hillocks. So we plough down the English Channel and across the Bay
of Biscay, which is no rougher than anywhere else, though people ask
with bated breath, "When shall we be in the Bay?" "Are we through the
Bay yet?" as if there was no other bay in all the world.

Then comes a day when all at once everyone on board seems to wake up and
become alive again. The sun shines in patches along the decks and the
sea is blue and sparkling. We are passing close beside a steep and rocky
coast, and so near do we go that we can see the white waves dashing
against it and even spouting up in sheets of spray through blow-holes in
the cliffs. What we see is the coast of Spain, so we have set eyes for
the first time on another country than our own. There are many other
steamers in this stretch of water, some small and some as large as ours,
some coming and some going. It is all much more lively than it was.
Soon we have pointed out to us the place where the battle of Trafalgar
was fought, when Britain won a victory that assured her the dominion of
the seas up to the present time--a battle in which our greatest sailor,
Lord Nelson, was killed in the moment of victory!

It is the next morning after this that, when we wake up, we find that
the tossing and rocking motion has ceased; it is curiously quiet, the
iron plates that bind the ship together no longer creak and groan as if
they were in agony. We are bewildered. Then in a moment the meaning of
all this flashes upon us. We have reached Gibraltar!

Coming up on deck we find the scene glorious. The sun is shining out of
a cloudless sky on to a sea so blue that it gives one a sort of pleasant
pain to look at its loveliness. The air is brilliant, as if we were
living at the heart of a crystal. The ship is stealing along so silently
and gently she hardly seems to move, and then she comes to anchor in a
bay that seems to be surrounded on all sides with hills. Some of these
hills, lying rather far away, gleam w