There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 men, and so uniforms of flaming red are plenty; and red and blue, and undress costumes of snowy white, and also the queer uniform of the bare-kneed Highlander; and one sees soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, and veiled Moorish beauties (I suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and turbaned, sashed, and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez, and long-robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and Tangier, some brown, some yellow and some as black as virgin ink—­and Jews from all around, in gabardine, skullcap, and slippers, just as they are in pictures and theaters, and just as they were three thousand years ago, no doubt.  You can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims suggest that expression, because they march in a straggling procession through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of complacency and independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen or sixteen states of the Union, found enough to stare at in this shifting panorama of fashion today.

Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance.  However, I do not count the Oracle in that list.  I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your very teeth as original with himself.  He reads a chapter in the guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from erudite authors who are dead now and out of print.  This morning at breakfast he pointed out of the window and said: 

“Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast?  It’s one of them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say—­and there’s the ultimate one alongside of it.”

“The ultimate one—­that is a good word—­but the pillars are not both on the same side of the strait.” (I saw he had been deceived by a carelessly written sentence in the guidebook.)

“Well, it ain’t for you to say, nor for me.  Some authors states it that way, and some states it different.  Old Gibbons don’t say nothing about it—­just shirks it complete—­Gibbons always done that when he got stuck —­but there is Rolampton, what does he say?  Why, be says that they was both on the same side, and Trinculian, and Sobaster, and Syraccus, and Langomarganbl——­”