The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes weary of the changeless sea, and by and by the ship’s company grew wonderfully cheerful.  But while we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the lowlands robed in misty gloom a finer picture burst upon us and chained every eye like a magnet—­a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till she was one towering mass of bellying sail!  She came speeding over the sea like a great bird.  Africa and Spain were forgotten.  All homage was for the beautiful stranger.  While everybody gazed she swept superbly by and flung the Stars and Stripes to the breeze!  Quicker than thought, hats and handkerchiefs flashed in the air, and a cheer went up!  She was beautiful before—­she was radiant now.  Many a one on our decks knew then for the first time how tame a sight his country’s flag is at home compared to what it is in a foreign land.  To see it is to see a vision of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a very river of sluggish blood!

We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the African one, “Ape’s Hill,” a grand old mountain with summit streaked with granite ledges, was in sight.  The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar, was yet to come.  The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world.  The information the ancients didn’t have was very voluminous.  Even the prophets wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there, I should think.

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar.  There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom.

The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I should say, by 1,400 to 1,500 feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide at its base.  One side and one end of it come about as straight up out of the sea as the side of a house, the other end is irregular and the other side is a steep slant which an army would find very difficult to climb.  At the foot of this slant is the walled town of Gibraltar—­or rather the town occupies part of the slant.  Everywhere—­on hillside, in the precipice, by the sea, on the heights—­everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad with masonry and bristling with guns.  It makes a striking and lively picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it.  It is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of a “gob” of mud on the end of a shingle.  A few hundred yards of this flat ground at its base belongs to the English, and then, extending across the strip from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of a mile, comes the “Neutral Ground,” a space two or three hundred yards wide, which is free to both parties.