"Well, why the deuce did you not let Halim Pasha and his nag alone? What did their race matter to you?"
"But lend me the telescope--what is that puff--a gun?"
"It is a smuggler running right for the harbour, pursued by a Spanish guarda costa; bang! there goes another gun from the Don."
"And right through the felucca's sail too!"
"Hollo! they will be within gunshot of us ere long," said I, springing up: "and this will be work for us. Sentry, call the gunner of the guard."
"Gunner of the guard!" reiterated the sentinel, who stood, bayonet in hand, under a sunshade, at the guard-house door.
The solitary artilleryman, who was attached to my guard, appeared in an instant with his sword by his side, and a lintstock in his hand.
"Get ready a gun," said I; "for there is a Spanish guarda costa in pursuit of a smuggler, and we must protect our friend."
"Oh, give him a twenty-four, and take a file of the guard to assist you."
While the smuggler, with her long sweeps out, and every stitch of canvas crowded on her long and tapering masts and whip-like yards, was straining every nerve to escape from the Spanish cruiser, which plied away with her bow guns, and bore after her close-hauled, and rushing through the shining waves till they seemed to smoke under her, it may be necessary to inform the reader that the manufacture and smuggling of tobacco and cigars at Gibraltar is a never-failing and never-ending source of angry discussion between the Governments of Spain and Britain; for, by the former, tobacco has long been reckoned a royal monopoly. Now, in Gibraltar, almost every second house is a cigar-shop, and more than two thousand men are daily employed in the manufacture of these articles of luxury, without which a Spaniard would be, as some one says. like a steamer without a funnel. Three-fourths of the British exports from Gibraltar to the three United Kingdoms are also smuggled, and to such an extent is the contraband trade carried, that the annual importation of tobacco into that fortified town, says Mr Porter, in his "Progress of the Nation," "amounts to from six millions to eight millions of pounds, nearly the whole of which is purchased by smugglers."
The boats of the contrabandistas are generally rigged as feluccas, and painted black; they are built sharp as a pike-head, and carry a heavy brass gun, which, in harbour, is usually concealed under a pile of old boxes and casks, with a tarpaulin thrown over it, while in cases of emergency, various pistols, pikes, and cutlasses, make their appearance in the hands of the brown-visaged, black-bearded, red-sashed, and rather pictorial-looking ruffians, whose chief occupation is to sleep and lounge about their decks by day.
