re fired into its
vital parts, but that is all it amounts to, cause it couldn't win any
battle for England, and could only sink trading vessels. The walls of
the rock are perforated from top to bottom, with holes big enough for
guns to squirt smoke and shells, but if the enemy should stay away from
right in front of the holes, they might shoot till doomsday and never
hit anything but fishing smacks and peddlers of oranges. Gibraltar is
like a white elephant in a zoological garden. It just eats and keeps off
the flies with its short tail, and visitors feed it peanuts and wonder
what it was made for, and how much hay it eats. Gibraltar is like a
twenty-dollar gold piece that a man carries in his watch pocket for an
emergency, which he never intends to spend until he gets in the tightest
place of his life, and it wears out one pocket after another, and some
day drops through on to the sidewalk, and a tramp finds it and goes on
a bat and gets the worth of his money, and has a good time, if he saves
enough to buy a bromo seltzer the next morning after. It is like the
Russian war chest, that is never to be opened as long as they can borrow
money. If Gibraltar could be put on castors, and rolled around from one
country to another, England could whip all Europe and Asia. It would be
a Tro Jane horse on a larger scale, and be a terror; but, say, if it got
to America we wouldn't do a thing to it. We would run a standpipe up the
side, and connect it with an oil pipe line, fill Gibraltar's tunnels and
avenues, and magazines and barracks with crude oil, and touch a match to
it, and not an Englishman would live to tell about it. Gee, but I would
be sorry for the Irish soldiers, but I guess they wouldn't be there,
cause they wouldn't fight America. Well, if England ever has a big war,
and she gets chesty about Gibraltar, and says it is impregnable, and
defies the world to take it, I bet you ten dollars it could be taken in
twenty-four hours. If I was a general, or an admiral, I would have about
forty tank steamers, loaded with kerosene, and have them land, innocent
like, right up beside Gibraltar, ostensibly to sell oil for perfumery
to the natives, who would all be improved by using kerosene on their
persons. Then I would get on a barrel, on deck of my flag ship, and
command the English general to surrender unconditionally, and if he
refused I would set a slow match on every oil vessel, and have the crews
get in skiffs and pull for the