[105] “I quitted this mosque after having left a considerable sum to the beggars who besiege the door. These people are not, indeed, very troublesome, for they are all registered, and their chief is the only person who asks for and receives the gifts of the faithful, which he divides among the others.”--ALI BEY, ii. 337. [106] A peasant in the New Forest once said to me, “Shoe-leather drives us to the workhouse: it costs more than all our clothes.” CHAPTER XI. CARTEIA.--TYRE AND HER WARES.--GLASS. Every time I left the “Rock,” or returned to it, I had to pass round or through the ruins of Carteia, always deferring an examination of them to a special day. At last that day was fixed, and I went with three friends, who more or less indulged in Phœnician predilections--the French consul, M. Bero, Mr. Cornwell, and Dr. Dunbreck. We talked over its old fortunes and great names, until it seemed that we were paying a visit to Balbus, and had made an excursion of some thousand years. We wandered over the red earth, which is a mass of pounded brick, interspersed with broken marble of all colours, and fragments of mortar which here and there showed surfaces smooth and painted like those of the walls of Pompeii. We gathered tiles of sundry dimensions, some grooved so as to fit together like those which have been recently discovered in Arabia; some two feet square, with borders raised like trays. They are quarrying still here, to build little boxes like those on Hampstead Heath. In one place they had opened rows of amphoræ standing on end. The only building which can be made out is Roman,--the amphitheatre,--it is on the side of the hill, overlooking the bay: the part resting against the hill still stands, even to the upper stories, to commemorate the importance of this first colony, and of the Romans, the settlement of the Hybrides, the Creoles of antiquity; a race produced from Roman fathers and Iberian mothers,--as before them the Bastuli were from Carthaginian fathers and Iberian mothers. It is curious to see the instinct with which a Spaniard,--I mean, of course, the educated class,--will catch at any allusion to those races: they do not relish it, and do, therefore, understand the intellectual bastardy of their own nature. It is, however, strange, that they should be ashamed of association with a cross which produced Hannibal and Asdrubal. I should like to see how _they_ would have taken the assimilation with the dry and rootless stumps of men[107] to whom Spain is now given over.