Who is he who now stops before the door without entering, and addresses a question to my host, who advances with a respectful salute? He is no common man, or his appearance belies him strangely. His dress is simple enough; a Spanish hat, with a peaked crown and broad shadowy brim—the veritable _sombrero_—jean pantaloons and blue hussar jacket;—but how well that dress becomes one of the most noble-looking figures I ever beheld! I gazed upon him with strange respect and admiration as he stood benignantly smiling and joking in good Spanish with an impudent rock rascal, who held in his hand a huge _bogamante_, or coarse carrion lobster, which he would fain have persuaded him to purchase. He was almost gigantically tall, towering nearly three inches above the burly host himself, yet athletically symmetrical, and straight as the pine-tree of Dovrefeld. He must have counted eleven lustres, which cast an air of mature dignity over a countenance which seemed to have been chiselled by some Grecian sculptor, and yet his hair was black as the plume of the Norwegian raven, and so was the moustache which curled above his well-formed lip. In the garb of Greece, and in the camp before Troy, I should have taken him for Agamemnon. “Is that man a general?” said I to a short queer-looking personage, who sat by my side, intently studying a newspaper. “That gentleman,” he whispered in a lisping accent, “is, sir, the Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar.” {309} On either side outside the door, squatting on the ground, or leaning indolently against the walls, were some half-dozen men of very singular appearance. Their principal garment was a kind of blue gown, something resembling the blouse worn by the peasants of the north of France, but not so long; it was compressed around their waists by a leathern girdle, and depended about halfway down their thighs. Their legs were bare, so that I had an opportunity of observing the calves, which appeared unnaturally large. Upon the head they wore small skull-caps of black wool. I asked the most athletic of these men, a dark-visaged fellow of forty, who they were. He answered, _humáles_. This word I knew to be Arabic, in which tongue it signifies a porter; and, indeed, the next moment, I saw a similar fellow staggering across the square under an immense burden, almost sufficient to have broken the back of a camel. On again addressing my swarthy friend, and inquiring whence he came, he replied, that he was born at Mogadore, in Barbary, but had passed the greatest part of his life at Gibraltar. He added, that he was the _capataz_, or head man, of the _hamáles_ near the door. I now addressed him in the Arabic of the East, though with scarcely the hope of being understood, more especially as he had been so long from his own country. He, however, answered very pertinently, his lips quivering with eagerness and his eyes sparkling with joy, though it was easy to perceive that the