In regularity of feature and fairness of complexion, Donna Paulina was inferior to many a pretty girl I have seen at home. Her most glorious attractions were her dark glossy tresses and her black eloquent eyes--brilliant, sad, subduing, ever varying, but ever black, and under their long, long fringes, ever melting. In beauty of form and grace of movement she was unmatched out of her own province, and I can assure the reader that the first time her very striking figure appeared among the promenaders in the Alameda of Gibraltar with her drapery of black lace falling from a high pearl comb, her mantilla, her close-fitting dress, her pretty feet in their Cordovan slippers, and her large fan, the unhappy bones of which were ever in a state of flutter and excitement, and between which she shot her most dangerous glances, it occasioned much marvel, curiosity, and speculation at all the mess-tables of Her Majesty's forces stationed on the rock. To such a companion imagine the charm of acting cicerone about the fortifications of old Gibraltar; imagine our evening rambles round Rosia Bay and along the new mole, where the ships of the British and Yankees, the French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Turks, Greeks, Moors, Arabs, and Jews, with all their varieties of ensigns, costume and rig, are riding at anchor, and where many a grim mortar and cannon gun frown over the new bastion; imagine the transition from the sunny Alameda to the deep cool galleries which are hewn in the heart of the living rock, and which are now turned to such war-like purposes as old Pomponius Mela, who first wrote of them, could never have conceived, and where we wandered for many an hour, the pretty donna forgetting the starched customs of her country so far as to grasp my arm with both her hands at times, for the aspect of these places filled her with timidity and awe. To these subterranean batteries there is admitted but a dim and dubious light that steals through their embrasures, glinting on the damp slime of their walls and roof of rock; and on the heavy ordnance--sixty-eight pounders some of them--which stand on frames of metal, on piles of balls and bombs, and on doors studded with iron, that lead to other and inner vaults full of missiles and unknown terrors.