On the silver sands of First Beach in the Island of Rhode Island, children were at play digging foundations, raising fortifications, laying out the parks and streets of a city. They worked long and hard; time was short, and the tide was coming in. Each wave, as it hissed and broke upon the beach, sent its thin line of foam a little nearer the brave outer wall of the town. Then came the inevitable inundation; the children shrieked with glee as the city wall crumbled, the church steeple toppled down, the courthouse collapsed. When nothing of the thriving sand city remained, save its trees and flowers,—floating bunches of red and green seaweed—the children, tired with much digging, sat down and looked across the water.

“What is over there?” asked the youngest, pointing an uncertain finger to the East.

“That is the Atlantic Ocean,” answered the eldest, “the nearest land is the coast of Spain.”

“When I grow up I shall go there,” said the youngest, “to see what Spain is like.”

After many years the child sailed across the Atlantic from the New World to the Old, passed between the Pillars of Hercules, through the “southern entrance of the ocean,” and landed on the Rock of Gibraltar. Sitting there by the lighthouse of Europa Point, and looking back across the waste of waters, the child had a vision of the city on the sands. This Rock, this last spur of Europe, how many sand cities has it seen washed away by the tides of time? The Calpe of the Phoenicians, the Jebel al Tarac of the Arabs, the Gibraltar of the Spaniards. Where Queen Adelaide’s lighthouse now sends its ray of light out into the darkness, the famous shrine of the Virgen de Europa once stood. Here, once upon a time, Jupiter, in the shape of a milk-white bull, plunged into the sea with the lovely Europa on his back, and swam with her to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos, whose ruined palace has just been discovered in that wonderful island of Crete. The land, more steadfast than the sea, keeps in its breast some of the things men prize most. In the palace of Minos they found a small, finely modeled, gold figure of a man with a bull’s head, cast in memory of the son of Jupiter and the lovely Europa.

As the stars pricked out from the blue, the child perceived they were the stars she knew at home, and that the constellation of Taurus was visible,—Taurus, the bull, still the animal of worship and of sacrifice in the Peninsula.

“When I have seen what Spain is like, I will tell the other children about it,” said the child; then she took out the guidebook and opened the map.