An English
Dean In Full Clericals, And Some English Ladies Talking In The
Waiting-Room, Added An Agreeable Confusion To Our Doubt Of Where And
What We Were, And We Came Away From The Hotel As Well Content As If We
Had Lunched In Plymouth Or Bath.
The table-waiter took an extra fee for
confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in
Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was
certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.
It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of
house rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin
Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and their
dark-green shutters. There is an English residential quarter at the east
end of the town, where the houses may be different, for all I know; the
English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us
to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in
grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed
nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have
infected it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should
not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small
house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it
dear, with other things proportionately so.
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