5000 feet out of as desolate a desert clothed with the stiff retama shrubs (a sort of broom) as you can well imagine. [(The Canadas, which he calls] “the one thing worth seeing there.”) It took us three hours and a half to get up, passing for a good deal of the time through a kind of low brush of white and red cistuses in full bloom.  We saw Palma on one side, and Grand Canary on the other, beyond the layer of clouds which enveloped all the lower part of the island.  Coming down was worse than going up, and we walked a good part of the way, getting back about six.  About seven hours in the saddle and walking.

You never saw anything like the improvement in Harry.  He is burnt deep red; he says my nose is of the same hue, and at the end of the journey he raced Gurilio, our guide, who understands no word of English any more than we do Spanish, but we are quite intimate nevertheless. [My brother indeed averred that his language of signs was far more effectual than the Spanish which my father persisted in trying upon the inhabitants.  This guide, by the way, was very sceptical as to any Englishman being equal to walking the seventeen miles, much less beating him in a race over the stony track.  His experience was entirely limited to invalids.]

He reiterates his distress at not getting letters from his wife:  “Certainly I will never run the risk of being so long without—­never again.”  When, after all, the delayed letters reached him on his way back from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a traveller who brought them up from Laguna, he writes (April 24):—­]

Catch me going out of reach of letters again.  I have been horridly anxious.  Nobody—­children or any one else—­can be to me what you are.  Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.

[Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto Orotava:—­]

It is very pretty to look at, but all draughts.  I compare it to the air of a big wash-house with all the doors open, and it was agreed that the likeness was exact.

[On May 2 he sailed for Madeira by the “German”, feeling already “ten years younger” for his holiday.  On the 3rd he writes:—­]

The last time I was in this place was in 1846.  All my life lies between the two visits.  I was then twenty-one and a half and I shall be sixty-five to-morrow.  The place looks to me to have grown a good deal, but I believe it is chiefly English residents whose villas dot the hill.  There were no roads forty-four years ago.  Now there is one, I am told, to Camera do Lobos nearly five miles long.  That is the measure of Portuguese progress in half a century.  Moreover, the men have left off wearing their pigtail caps and the women their hoods.

[To his youngest daughter:—­]

Bella Vista Hotel, Funchal, May 6, 1890.

Dearest Babs,