There was always the remote hazard of a Carlist rising in San Sebastian, for there were in the city the children of settlers from the rural districts who bit their thumbs at the sight of the muzzled _San Margarita_, and prayed that Charles VII. might have "his ain again." But they were in the minority. The Miqueletes, a soldierly body of men in scarlet Basque scones very like to the Carlist head-gear, and a blue capote with cape attached, garrisoned the citadel. They were brave and loyal to the Republic, and the object of deep grudge to the Chicos, for they were Basques of the towns. Many of these provincial militiamen had come in from the small pueblos in the neighbourhood, where they ran the risk of being eaten up by "the bhoys;" and this was the only accession to the population which redeemed the dismal, tradeless port from the appearance of having been stricken by plague and abandoned, and lent it at intervals an artificial bustle.
I sickened of San Sebastian, with its angular propriety; its high, haughty houses, holding up their heads in architectural primness; its wide geometrical streets, where there is no shade in the sun, no shelter in the wind. I began to hate it for its rectilinearity, and dub it a priggish, stuck-up, arrogant upstart among cities. What business had it to be so straight and clean and airy? Fain would I shake the dust off my feet in testimony against it; but here was the trouble. How to get away--that was a knotty problem. The railway had been torn up for months, and the armour-vested locomotives were rusting on the sidings at Hendaye. The dirty hot little tug, the _Alcorta_, that plies between the quay and Socoa, had left; and I grieved not, for the thought of a passage by her was nausea. Three more torturing hours never dragged their slow length along for me than those I spent on board her coming over. Try and call up to yourself three hours in a low-class cook-shop, coated an inch thick with filth, and fitted over the boiler of a penny steamer dancing a marine break-down on the Thames, opposite the outlet of the main-drainage pipes. That, intensified by strange oaths and slop-basins, was the passage by the _Alcorta_. But dreary, lonely San Sebastian was not to be endured. Those poor fellows above, accustomed to the wild freshness and freedom of the sea, how they must mourn and repine! By some means or other I must get back to the world that is not petrified. No diligences dare to affront the dangers of the short journey to the Irun railway-station, since three were stopped some days before, the traces cut, the horses stolen, the windows shattered, the woodwork burned, and the charred wreck left on the roadside, a terror to those who neglect to obey the commands of the Royalist leaders.