Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Leland, Charles Godfrey, 1824-1903
I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all this. I strolled
about the streets talking Spanish to everybody. Then I met with a
smuggler, who asked me if I wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my
uncle George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Havanas, and
these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had smoked the last twenty-
five on the last day. So I went and bought at a low enough figure a box
of the worst cigars I had ever met with. But youth can smoke
anything--except deceit.
Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those days, but an
incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorruptible dollar or two,
showed us over them. There was, too, a remarkable man, a ship-chandler
named Felipe, to whom I was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four
languages. He boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then
a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, who was a
perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he had had a new _maja_, or
_moza_, or _muger_, or _puta_, every night for twenty years! which was
confirmed by common report. It was a firm principle with him to always
_change_. This extraordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a
_psychological_ phenomenon. This far surpassed anything I had ever heard
at Princeton. Then this and that great English dignitary was pointed out
to me--black eyes ogled me--everybody was polite, for I had a touch of
the Spanish manner which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and
others whom I had known in Philadelphia; and, in short, I saw more that
was picturesque and congenial in that one day than I had ever beheld in
all my life before. I had got into "my plate."
From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Marseilles. The coasts were full of
old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off Malaga for a day, but I could
not go ashore, much as I longed to. At Marseilles, Sam and the captain
and I went to a very good hotel.
Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain French lady--the
captain said she was a Baroness--having fallen in love with the said
captain, had secreted herself on board the vessel, greatly to his horror,
and reappeared when out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at
Marseilles, the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot
the captain, which made a great _scandal_. And, moved by this example,
the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, shot the head-waiter on
the same day, being also instigated by jealousy. Sam Godfrey chaffed the
captain for setting a bad moral example to the niggers--which was all
quite a change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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