It Was Something Like This, If Not Quite Like It, And It Ended In Our Seeing Africa Only From The Southernmost Verge Of Europe At Tarifa.

At that little distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have been no cleaner on closer approach.

III

As a matter of fact, we were very near not going even to Tarifa, though we had promised ourselves going from the first. But it was very charming to linger in the civilization of that hotel; to wander through its garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon's writing and inhale the keen aromatic odors of the eucalyptus, and when the day waned to have tea at an iron table on the seaward terrace. Or if we went to Gibraltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner joining a pleasant international group in the long reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, if you got near them, were so comforting against the evening chill. Sometimes the pleasure of the time was heightened by the rain pattering on the glass roof of the _patio,_ where in the afternoon a bulky Spanish mother sat mute beside her basket of laces which you could buy if you would, but need not if you would rather not; in either case she smiled placidly.

At last we did get together courage enough to drive twelve miles over the hills to Tarifa, but this courage was pieced out of the fragments of the courage we had lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile which runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed Tarifa was so bad that those who had endured it said nobody could endure it, and in such a case I was sure I could not, but now I am sorry I did not venture, for since then I have motored over some of the roads in the state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had that Spanish road as far as Tarifa they would think it the superb Massachusetts state road gone astray, and it would be thought a good road anywhere, with the promise of being better when the young eucalyptus trees planted every few yards along it grew big enough to shade it. But we were glad of as much sun as we could get on the brisk November morning when we drove out of the hotel garden and began the long climb, with little intervals of level and even of lapse. We started at ten o'clock, and it was not too late in that land of anomalous hours to meet peasants on their mules and donkeys bringing loads of stuff to market in Algeciras. Men were plowing with many yoke of oxen in the wheat-fields; elsewhere there were green pastures with herds of horses grazing in them, an abundance of brown pigs, and flocks of sheep with small lambs plaintively bleating.

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