when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she

would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the

fortresses. If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag

for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up

there."

We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the

subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock. These

galleries are like spacious railway tunnels, and at short intervals in

them great guns frown out upon sea and town through portholes five or six

hundred feet above the ocean. There is a mile or so of this subterranean

work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor. The gallery

guns command the peninsula and the harbors of both oceans, but they

might

as well not be there, I should think, for an army could hardly climb the

perpendicular wall of the rock anyhow. Those lofty portholes afford

superb views of the sea, though. At one place, where a jutting crag was

hollowed out into a great chamber whose furniture was huge cannon and

whose windows were portholes, a glimpse was caught of a hill not far

away, and a soldier said:

That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen

of Spain placed her chair there once when the French and Spanish troops

were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot

till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses. If the English

hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day,

The Innocents Abroad