It rose beyond five
miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for
three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at
last for New York.
Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our
Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened
ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses,
beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all
in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet the
stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away
with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day
after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel
the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern
fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the
historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing
that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the
thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and
their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and
remain so to this day.
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