After having spent some pleasant days at Gibraltar, I inquired respecting conveyances to Malaga. I learnt that it was a two days’ journey on mule back; and that the character of the country between Gibraltar and Malaga, was precisely the same as that which I had travelled from Cadiz. Tempted the same afternoon by a fine breeze from the west, and by an offer of a passage in a Spanish mystico, which the captain assured me would sail at six next morning, and would be in Malaga the same evening, I got all ready,--took out my passport and a bill of health, and went to bed in the hope of sleeping next night in Malaga. I gladly avail myself of this opportunity of mentioning the unjustifiable exactions of the public offices in this British possession. Throughout the whole of Spain, more than two pecetas (1_s._ 8_d._) had never been demanded at any passport office; but at Gibraltar, where it is difficult to understand upon what principle an English subject should require permission of the English authorities to visit Malaga,--I was charged a dollar. As well might an Englishman about to visit Calais, be obliged to have the permission of Sir Richard Birnie. At all events, the charge is extravagant, and therefore unjust; the petty officer who signs his name at Gibraltar, and pockets the crown, is not, like a consul in a foreign port, the representative of the British government, and obliged to spend all, or more than all, that he receives. In Gibraltar the governor is the representative of the government; and the demand of a dollar from every Englishman who passes through Gibraltar, can only be regarded as a robbery of British subjects to support a sinecurist. Looking from my window, about five next morning, I saw with dismay, that the wind had increased almost to a storm, still from the west, but too violent to allow any vessel to beat out of the bay; for it is a great difficulty attending the navigation from Gibraltar, that the most favourable wind for the Levant, is the most adverse for carrying a vessel out of the bay. I had made up my mind to bear the delay, and be contented with reading the English newspapers, and with an English dinner in the hotel, when the master of the mystico sent to inform me that the wind had so much abated as to permit him to beat out, and that he was on the point of sailing. I immediately ran down to the harbour, hired a boat, and was just in time to catch the mystico upon one of its tacks. The vessel had been obliged to leave the harbour, because, after gun-fire at five o’clock, the gates and harbour are shut, and nothing is permitted to pass out or in.