However, I shall not complete this work unless I make a start. _Dimidium facti_--but these odds and ends of Latin, which give to style an eighteen-penny polish of erudition and prove nothing, you can pick at will from "Swain's Collection of Easy Sentences." If I wait till I am in the mood, my suspense may be as long as that of the rustic on the bank of the stream. Perhaps Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was near the mark when he said that the author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted. And now a paragraph to elucidate why I have dedicated this book to a gentleman with whom I never exchanged a word. Apart from the bright and solid facts that he wards the weak, and has the pluck to change his opinions when he feels himself in the wrong, there are in his case two reasons all-sufficient to secure his counterfeit presentment a niche in my album, and himself a nook in my heart--he hath killed a bull in the arena, and he is husband of Byron's grand-daughter; and Byron was a poet--yea, a poet, I re-affirm, the hysterics to the contrary of sixteen screaming _laudatores Veneris_ in non-lucid intervals counting for naught. * * * * * I have lost faith in Wat. In a moment of misplaced confidence I laid a wager on him at a spelling competition. He put one _n_ in innuendo, and the _i_ after the _ll_s in paillasse. If he had only gone to the root of the matter! I offered such long odds, too--a frayed copy of the "Iliad" to a gilt and morocco-bound set of the "Newgate Calendar." CHAPTER II The Old-Fashioned Invocation--"Them 'ere Spanish Kings!"--Candidates for a Throne--_En Voyage_--Bordeaux and the Back-ache--An Unmannerly Alsatian--The Patriot gets a Roland for his Oliver--Small Change for a Hot Bath--Plan for Universal Coinage--Daughters of Israel--The Jews Diagnosed--Across the Border--The Writer is Saluted "Caballero"--Bugaboo Santa Cruz--Over a Brasero. O mules, liquorice, onions, oranges, garlic, and eke figs, cork and olives, and all you other products of Spain, come to my aid now that I enter upon my theme! Why should not a prose-chronicler of this era proffer his appeal as did the poets of era undetermined, of the eras of Augustus or the Second Charles? Perchance the _Θεα_, _Musa_, or Muse, to whom he makes his plea, may prove less kind than those to whom Homer, Virgil, or Milton prayed; but he has his remedy. In most instances, he can eat them. Having complied with what used to be a hallowed custom, I shall now, following the example of that shrewd man, the late Abraham Lincoln, proceed to tell a story. The deadly sin in any book is dulness, and an occasional anecdote--if it point a moral so much the better--is sovran balsam for spleen.