The Major remained in his chair, in the same posture. His pipe was
smoked out, but he continued to suck absently at the empty tube. His
bewilderment and perturbation were so great that, though he sat up
till two in the morning, during which time he smoked eleven pipes, and
increased the two glasses of grog with which he was accustomed to
prepare for his pillow to four, he was still, when he went to bed,
as agitated as ever.
In this state of mind he went to the altar, for next day a double
ceremony was performed, making Owen happy with Juana, and giving
Carlota a husband and me a grandfather. The Major was more like a
proxy than a principal in the affair; for Owen, taking the entire
management upon himself, left him little more to do than to make the
necessary responses.
Carlota made a very good-tempered, quiet, inobtrusive helpmate, and
continued to be fond of her spouse even after he was a grey-headed
colonel. My grandfather, though credulous in most matters, could with
difficulty be brought to consider himself married. He would sometimes
seem to forget the circumstance for a whole day together, till it came
to be forced on his recollection at bed-time. And when, about a year
after his marriage, a new-born female Flinders (now my venerable aunt)
was brought one morning by the nurse for his inspection and approval,
he gazed at it with a puzzled air, and could not be convinced that he
was actually in the presence of his own flesh and blood, till he
had touched the cheek of his first-born with the point of his
tobacco-pipe, removed from his mouth for that purpose, making on
the infant's countenance a small indentation.
The little Governor, Don Pablo, was subsequently induced to forgive
his relatives, and frequent visits and attentions were interchanged,
till the commencement of the siege put a stop to all intercourse
between Gibraltar and Spain.
I have often, on a summer's evening, sat looking across the bay at a
gorgeous sunset, and retracing in imagination the incidents I have
related. My grandfather's establishment was broken up during the siege
by the enemy's shells, but a similar one now stands on what I think
must have been about the site of it. The world has changed since
then; but Spain is no land of change; and, looking on the imperishable
outline of the Andalucian hills, unaltered, probably, since a time to
which the period of my tale is but as yesterday, it is easy for me to
"daff aside" the noisy world without, and, dropping quietly behind the
age, to picture to myself my old-fashioned grandfather issuing forth
from yonder white-walled town of Algeciras with his future bride.
THE IRON SHROUD.
BY WILLIAM MUDFORD.
[_MAGA._ AUGUST 1830.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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