as long as
his provisions lasted. This lofty citadel is almost impregnable. It was
hither the French retired in 1813, and it took General Graham all that
he knew to dislodge them. If I were asked what were the prospects of the
Carlists getting into the place, I should say there was but one--by
crossing over a golden bridge. But that implied the possession of money,
and money was precisely what the Carlists declared they needed most.

There was always the remote hazard of a Carlist rising in San Sebastian,
for there were in the city the children of settlers from the rural
districts who bit their thumbs at the sight of the muzzled _San
Margarita_, and prayed that Charles VII. might have "his ain again." But
they were in the minority. The Miqueletes, a soldierly body of men in
scarlet Basque scones very like to the Carlist head-gear, and a blue
capote with cape attached, garrisoned the citadel. They were brave and
loyal to the Republic, and the object of deep grudge to the Chicos, for
they were Basques of the towns. Many of these provincial militiamen had
come in from the small pueblos in the neighbourhood, where they ran the
risk of being eaten up by "the bhoys;" and this was the only accession
to the population which redeemed the dismal, tradeless port from the
appearance of having been stricken by plague and abandoned, and lent it
at intervals an artificial bustle.

I sickened of San Sebastian, with its angular propriety; its high,
haughty houses, holding up their heads in architectural primness; its
wide geometrical streets, where there is no shade in the sun, no shelter
in the wind. I began to hate it for its rectilinearity, and dub it a
priggish, stuck-up, arrogant upstart among cities. What business had it
to be so straight and clean and airy? Fain would I shake the dust off my
feet in testimony against it; but here was the trouble. How to get
away--that was a knotty problem. The railway had been torn up for
months, and the armour-vested locomotives were rusting on the sidings at
Hendaye. The dirty hot little tug, the _Alcorta_, that plies between the
quay and Socoa, had left; and I grieved not, for the thought of a
passage by her was nausea. Three more torturing hours never dragged
their slow length along for me than those I spent on board her coming
over. Try and call up to yourself three hours in a low-class cook-shop,
coated an inch thick with filth, and fitted over the boiler of a penny
steamer dancing a mari