The solitary artilleryman, who was attached to my guard, appeared in an instant with his sword by his side, and a lintstock in his hand. "Get ready a gun," said I; "for there is a Spanish guarda costa in pursuit of a smuggler, and we must protect our friend." "An 18-pounder, or a 24, sir?" "Oh, give him a twenty-four, and take a file of the guard to assist you." While the smuggler, with her long sweeps out, and every stitch of canvas crowded on her long and tapering masts and whip-like yards, was straining every nerve to escape from the Spanish cruiser, which plied away with her bow guns, and bore after her close-hauled, and rushing through the shining waves till they seemed to smoke under her, it may be necessary to inform the reader that the manufacture and smuggling of tobacco and cigars at Gibraltar is a never-failing and never-ending source of angry discussion between the Governments of Spain and Britain; for, by the former, tobacco has long been reckoned a royal monopoly. Now, in Gibraltar, almost every second house is a cigar-shop, and more than two thousand men are daily employed in the manufacture of these articles of luxury, without which a Spaniard would be, as some one says. like a steamer without a funnel. Three-fourths of the British exports from Gibraltar to the three United Kingdoms are also smuggled, and to such an extent is the contraband trade carried, that the annual importation of tobacco into that fortified town, says Mr Porter, in his "Progress of the Nation," "amounts to from six millions to eight millions of pounds, nearly the whole of which is purchased by smugglers." The boats of the contrabandistas are generally rigged as feluccas, and painted black; they are built sharp as a pike-head, and carry a heavy brass gun, which, in harbour, is usually concealed under a pile of old boxes and casks, with a tarpaulin thrown over it, while in cases of emergency, various pistols, pikes, and cutlasses, make their appearance in the hands of the brown-visaged, black-bearded, red-sashed, and rather pictorial-looking ruffians, whose chief occupation is to sleep and lounge about their decks by day. To look out for these lads of the knife and pistol, the Government of Her Most Catholic Majesty maintains a number of fast-sailing revenue craft, called guarda costas, commanded by brave and vigilant officers. These are the abhorrence of the contrabandistas, whose operations are greatly facilitated on land by the concurrence of the corrupt Spanish officials; and those guarda costas, in their zeal, had, of late, been rash enough to pursue their prey into those waters which are under the jurisdiction of the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar; and in three instances had boarded them with pistol and cutlass, shot the crews, or driven them overboard, and thereafter cut the feluccas out from under the very guns of Her Britannic Majesty's fortress.