For some time after their arrival on the Rock, the officers of the Duke’s Own called it a detestable hole. They were sore at their expatriation and the manner of it; they regretted the joys they had left behind, and could see no good thing in the much vaunted station where they were now relegated for their sins. There was nothing to be done in the place; the climate was intolerable, and there was nothing to eat. They had arrived towards the end of the summer, and the season, never cool, had been unusually sultry. They came in too for the tail end of a long visitation of the ‘Levanter,’ the much dreaded east wind, which caps the Rock with a perpetual cloud and makes life miserable to all; and the welcome change, when it came at length, was heralded by a tremendous thunderstorm and drenching rains. The Duke’s Own were still under canvas at the North Front, waiting till the outgoing regiment vacated its quarters at Windmill Hill, and their encampment was nearly swept away by the storm. Officers lost baggage, the men their kits, and the whole regiment united in deep denunciations of the inhospitable Rock. Nor did Gibraltar seem to improve upon a closer acquaintance. Its joys and amusements, what were they after London and the shires? Racing! the idea was too preposterous. Half-a-dozen tinpot nags without pace or breeding, cantering round a Graveyard and finishing in a trot. What sort of sport was that to offer the Duke’s Own, which had always had its own regimental drag to witness the great events at home, and which kept open house in its luncheon tent at Ascot and Goodwood and upon Epsom Downs? The hunting too! heaven save the mark! To talk of hunting with the sweepings of a few second-rate kennels, dignified with the name of a pack, when the huntsman was a local genius, and foxes were said to be so scarce or so little enterprising that it was often necessary to have recourse to a red herring! What was such hunting to men who had been constantly out (so they said) with the Heythorp, the Bramham Moor, the Pytchley and Quorn?