[It did not take him long to recover his sea-legs, and he thoroughly enjoyed even the rougher days when the rolling of the ship was too much for other people.  The day before reaching Teneriffe he writes:—­]

I have not felt so well for a long time.  I do nothing, have a prodigious appetite, and Harry declares I am getting fat in the face.

[Santa Cruz was reached early on April 10, and in the afternoon he proceeded to Laguna, which he made his headquarters for a week.  That day he walked 10 miles, the next 15, and the third 20 in the course of the day.  He notes finding the characteristic Euphorbia and Heaths of the Canaries; notes, too, one or two visitations of dyspepsia from indigestible food.  He writes from Laguna:—­]

From all that people with whom we meet tell me, I gather that the usual massive lies about health resorts pervade the accounts of Teneriffe.  Santa Cruz would reduce me to jelly in a week, and I hear that Orotava is worse—­stifling.  Guimar, whither we go to-morrow, is warranted to be dry and everlasting sunshine.  We shall see.  One of the people staying in the house said they had rain there for a fortnight together...I am all right now, and walked some 15 miles up hill and down dale to-day, and I am not more than comfortably tired.  However, I am not going to try the peak.  I find it cannot be done without a night out at a considerable height when the thermometer commonly goes down below freezing, and I am not going to run that risk for the chance of seeing even the famous shadows.

[By some mischance, no letters from home reached him till the 26th, and he writes from Guimar on the 23rd:—­]

A lady who lives here told me yesterday that a postmistress at one place was in the habit of taking off the stamps and turning the letters on one side!  But that luckily is not a particular dodge with ours.

We drove over here on the 17th.  It is a very picturesque place 1000 feet up in the midst of a great amphitheatre of high hills, facing north, orange-trees laden with fruit, date palms and bananas are in the garden, and there is lovely sunshine all day long.  Altogether the climate is far the best I have found anywhere here, and the house, which is that of a Spanish Marquesa, only opened as a hotel this winter, is very comfortable.  I am sitting with the window wide open at nine o’clock at night, and the stars flash as if the sky were Australian.

On Saturday we had a splendid excursion up to the top of the pass that leads from here up to the other side of the island.  Road in the proper sense there was none, and the track incredibly bad, worse than any Alpine path owing to the loose irregular stones.  The mules, however, pick their way like cats, and you have only to hold on.  The pass is 6000 feet high, and we ascended still higher.  Fortune favoured us.  It was a lovely day and the clouds lay in a great sheet a thousand feet below.  The peak, clear in the blue sky, rose up bare and majestic