with more shining leaves; and, indeed, there was a hard, glossy, coriaceous look to the vegetation generally, which made us sometimes long for the soft, tender green of more temperate zones.  The novel beauty of the Dabney gardens can scarcely be exaggerated; each step was a new incursion into the tropics,—­a palm, a magnolia, a camphor-tree, a dragon-tree, suggesting Humboldt and Orotava, a clump of bamboos or cork-trees, or the startling strangeness of the great grass-like banana, itself a jungle.  There are hedges of pittosporum, arbors veiled by passion-flowers, and two of that most beautiful of all living trees, the araucaria, or Norfolk Island pine,—­one specimen being some eighty feet high, and said to be the tallest north of the equator.  And when over all this luxuriant exotic beauty the soft clouds furled away and the sun showed us Pico, we had no more to ask, and the soft, beautiful blue cone became an altar for our gratitude, and the thin mist of hot volcanic air that flickered above it seemed the rising incense of the world.

In the midst of all these charming surprises, we found it hard to begin at once upon the study of the language, although the prospect of a six-months’ stay made it desirable.  We were pleased to experience the odd, stupid sensation of having people talk loud to us as being foreigners, and of seeing even the little children so much more at their ease than we were.  And every step beyond this was a new enjoyment.  We found the requisites for learning a language on its own soil to be a firm will, a quick ear, flexible lips, and a great deal of cool audacity.  Plunge boldly in, expecting to make countless blunders; find out the shops where they speak English, and don’t go there; make your first bargains at twenty-five per cent. disadvantage, and charge it as a lesson in the language; expect to be laughed at, and laugh yourself, because you win.  The daily labor is its own reward.  If it is a pleasure to look through a telescope in an observatory, gradually increasing its powers until a dim nebula is resolved into a whole galaxy of separate stars, how much more when the nebula is one of language around you, and the telescope is your own more educated ear!

We discovered further, what no one had ever told us, that the ability to speak French, however poorly, is rather a drawback in learning any less universal language, because the best company in any nation will usually have some knowledge of French, and this tempts one to remain on neutral ground and be lazy.  But the best company in Fayal was so much less interesting than the peasantry, that some of us persevered in studying the vernacular.  To be sure, one finds English spoken by more of the peasants than of the small aristocracy of the island, so many of the former have spent some years in American whale-ships, and come back to settle down with their savings in their native village.  In visiting the smaller hamlets on the island, I usually found that the owners of the two or three most decent houses had learned to speak English in this way.  But I was amused at the dismay of an American sea-captain who on a shooting excursion ventured on some free criticisms on the agriculture of a farm, and was soon answered in excellent English by the proprietor.