That day I dined with my hosts. In the cool of the evening I walked with them in the garden; but at the board, and beneath the orange-trees, I saw but one face and one form. In my sleep the star-like eyes of Joseffa haunted me; her voice rang unceasingly in my brain. When I ventured to take her hand, mine trembled as though I were a palsied old man—when she left me, the salt of existence seemed to have lost its savour. I went and came musing. I took no pleasure in aught save what related to her. In short, I had fallen certain fathoms deep in love. And, verily, it was not wonderful. I lived in a state of existence so new, that it seemed to me, then, and seems to me still, a Dreamland—a long, sweet unreal vision. Consider what I was—a rude mariner, ever-brought up in the coarse company of rough and unpolished men, with hands fit to swing a lead-line, or tie a reef-point; with a voice good for hailing the fore-top in a gale of wind; but with neither hands nor voice trained for the soft requirements of a lady’s bower. I laugh, with a melancholy mirth, now, when I think of what my uncouthness must have been. Here was I a rough and round sailor—a fellow who had been kicked about in Scotch brigs, and buccaneering small craft all my days—to whose tongue the lingo of the forecastle came as my mother-speech; who had hardly slept but in a swinging hammock—ate but of lobscouse and sea-pie—sang but roaring sea-ballads, or thought but of storms and calms, and ships and rigs, with now and then a waking dream of old boyish days, of the Royal Thistle and the Balwearie Burn, or mayhap the memory of an ancient Scots legend, or a warm gush of feeling when I pondered on my old mother, by the ingle-nook in the fisher’s cottage, near Kirkleslie Pier. Such was I then, such my very nature, body and soul, and yet now did I find myself the lover of a gentle Spanish lady, walking with her through garden bowers, communing with her under shady verandahs, talking of things I hardly dreamt of even as lurking in the bottom of my soul. And she neither jeered at my port, nor flouted my rough speech. She loved to hear of my country, and when I told her our gallant tales of the Bruce, of how he was crowned King of Scotland, crowned not in an abbey, by no holy hand of priest, and without the ancient symbol of the sovereignty of the realm, but in a wilderness, with a circlet of gold hastily wrought out, and by the hands of a famous heroine, dear to the heart and memory of a Scot, for ever—the Countess of Marr—when, I say, I told such tales, Joseffa would hang, as it were, upon my lips, and then saying that Spain also had its great heroes and mighty men of old, would draw her fingers strongly across the thrilling strings of her guitar, and with flashing eye and widened nostril, sing the glorious ballads of her nation, of the battles between the Spanish chivalry and the Paynim Moors, of the conquest of Alhama, and the life and death of Diaz de Bivar, the peerless Cid.