Oh! but it was a dull-faced Ms., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order.  It was like the drone of a monotonous voice.  A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance.  “In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry.  Don’t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find.  Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art.  Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies.  Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn’t progress! . . .  Why immense!  We have moved on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch.  And of course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now.  This one, the one of the title, was situated in Spain.  That much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were missing—­perhaps not a great misfortune after all.  The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast—­ presumably the north coast of Spain.  His experience has nothing to do with the sea, though.  As far as I can make it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war.  There’s nothing strange in that.  At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain--as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to perform.  A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I’ve said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing:  gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity.  But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province.  Something of the sort.  All this can be only inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.