whose glances and deportment showed a
precocious proficiency in the arts of flirtation. At this ball Garry
had become enamoured beyond all former passions (and they were
numerous and inconstant, in general, as if he had been a Grand Turk)
of one of his partners, a young Spanish lady. Her graceful figure and
motions in the dance had at first captivated him--and when, after
dancing with her himself, his eloquent entreaties, delivered in
indifferent Spanish, had prevailed on her to lift her mask for one coy
moment, the vision of eyes and eyebrows (the common beauties of a
Spanish countenance), and the clear rosy complexion, a much more rare
perfection, then revealed, had accomplished the utter subjugation of
his errant fancy. She had vanished from the ball silently and
irremediably, as a houri of Paradise from the awakening eyes of an
opium-eating Pasha; and all his attempts to trace her, continued
unceasingly for a couple of months afterwards, had proved in vain.

One morning my grandfather was seated at breakfast in the verandah of
his quarters, situated high up the rock above the town. Below him lay
the roofs, terraced and balconied, and populous with cats, for whose
convenience the little flat stone squares at the top of most of the
houses appeared to have been devised. Tall towers, called mirandas,
shot up at intervals, from whose summits the half-baked inhabitants,
pent within close walls and streets, might catch refreshing glimpses
of the blue sea and the hills of Spain--conveniences destined soon
afterwards to be ruined by the enemy's fire, or pulled down to avoid
attracting it, and never rebuilt. Beyond the white sunny ridge of the
line wall came the sharp edge of the bay, rising in high perspective
to the purple coast of Spain opposite, which was sprinkled with
buildings white as the sails that dotted the water. My grandfather was
in a state of great sensual enjoyment, sniffing up the odour of the
large geranium-bushes that grew in clumps in the little garden in
front, and the roses that twined thickly round the trellis of the
vine-roofed verandah; sipping thick creamy Spanish chocolate between
the mouthfuls of red mullet, broiled in white paper, the flavour of
which he was diligently comparing with that of some specimens of
the same fish which he remembered to have eaten in his youth in
Devonshire; and glancing sideways over the cup at an open volume of
Shakespeare, leaned slopingly on the edge of a plate of bla