is fenced in by tall, solid lava walls, which will last a thousand years in this land where frost is unknown.  They are very thick, and are often plastered and whitewashed and capped with projecting slabs of cut stone.  Trees from gardens above hang their swaying tendrils down, and contrast their bright green with the whitewash or the black lava of the walls and make them beautiful.  The trees and vines stretch across these narrow roadways sometimes and so shut out the sun that you seem to be riding through a tunnel.  The pavements, the roads, and the bridges are all government work.

The bridges are of a single span—­a single arch—­of cut stone, without a support, and paved on top with flags of lava and ornamental pebblework.  Everywhere are walls, walls, walls, and all of them tasteful and handsome—­and eternally substantial; and everywhere are those marvelous pavements, so neat, so smooth, and so indestructible.  And if ever roads and streets and the outsides of houses were perfectly free from any sign or semblance of dirt, or dust, or mud, or uncleanliness of any kind, it is Horta, it is Fayal.  The lower classes of the people, in their persons and their domiciles, are not clean—­but there it stops—­the town and the island are miracles of cleanliness.

We arrived home again finally, after a ten-mile excursion, and the irrepressible muleteers scampered at our heels through the main street, goading the donkeys, shouting the everlasting “Sekki-yah,” and singing “John Brown’s Body” in ruinous English.

When we were dismounted and it came to settling, the shouting and jawing and swearing and quarreling among the muleteers and with us was nearly deafening.  One fellow would demand a dollar an hour for the use of his donkey; another claimed half a dollar for pricking him up, another a quarter for helping in that service, and about fourteen guides presented bills for showing us the way through the town and its environs; and every vagrant of them was more vociferous, and more vehement and more frantic in gesture than his neighbor.  We paid one guide and paid for one muleteer to each donkey.

The mountains on some of the islands are very high.  We sailed along the shore of the island of Pico, under a stately green pyramid that rose up with one unbroken sweep from our very feet to an altitude of 7,613 feet, and thrust its summit above the white clouds like an island adrift in a fog!

We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc., in these Azores, of course.  But I will desist.  I am not here to write Patent Office reports.

We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five or six days out from the Azores.

CHAPTER VII.

A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with spray—­spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thick with a white crust of salt to their very tops; a week of shivering in the shelter of the lifeboats and deckhouses by day and blowing suffocating “clouds” and boisterously performing at dominoes in the smoking room at night.