riumph for the railway company, which owed nothing in the
way of countenance to the young English couple; they had done nothing
but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves arrived safely soon
after nightfall at Algeciras, just in time for dinner in the comfortable
mother-hotel whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after
breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of
the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years
before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five
miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for
three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at
last for New York.

Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our
Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened
ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses,
beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all
in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet
the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away
with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day
after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel
the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern
fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the
historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing
that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the
thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and
their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and
remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these
kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical
English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by "a
deep dream of peace" till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly
assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous
conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.

[Illustration: 31 VIEW OF ALGECIRAS]

I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras,
and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself
altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of histo