whether it was not just as well. In systematically cultivating
his mind, he would merely have been laying a top-dressing on a thin
soil--manuring where there would never have been a crop--and some
pleasant old weeds would have been pulled up in the process. A green
thistly common, even though a goose could hardly find sustenance
there, is nature still, which can hardly be said of a patch of earth
covered with guano.

So my grandfather went on enjoying himself without remorse after his
own fashion, and never troubled himself to think--an operation that
would have been inconvenient to himself, and productive of no great
results to the world. He transplanted his English habits to Gibraltar;
and, after being two years there, knew nothing more of Spain or
Spaniards than the view of the Andalucian hills from the Rock, and a
short constitutional daily ride along the beach beyond the Spanish
lines, to promote appetite and digestion, afforded him. And so he
might have continued to vegetate during the remainder of his service
there, but for a new acquaintance that he made about this time.

Frank Owen, commonly called Garry Owen by his familiars, was one of
those joyous spirits whose pleasant faces and engaging manners serve
as a perpetual act of indemnity for all breaches of decorum, and
trespasses over social and conventional fences, committed by them in
the gaiety of their hearts. In reproving his many derelictions of
military duty, the grim colonel of the regiment would insensibly
exchange his habitual tone of severe displeasure for one of mild
remonstrance--influenced, probably, quite as much, in secret, by the
popularity of the unrepentant offender, as by any personal regard
for him. Captain Hedgehog, who had shot a man through the heart for
corking his face one night when he was drunk, and all contact with
whose detonating points of honour was as carefully avoided by his
acquaintance as if they had been the wires of a spring-gun, sustained
Garry's reckless personalities with a sort of warning growl utterly
thrown away upon the imperturbable wag, who would still persist, in
the innocence of his heart, in playing round the den of this military
cockatrice. And three months after his arrival in Gibraltar, being one
day detected by a fierce old Spanish lady in the very act of kissing
her daughter behind the little senorita's great painted fan, his
good-humoured impudence converted the impending storm into a mild
drizzle of re