furthest altitude of snow-hooded Teide, emerging with all the mystery of nature's simplicity out of the silence and peopled gloom of night.

A little pier shoots out upon ocean's marbled plain, and the movement of boats and dusk-hued sails getting ready to meet the steamer seems as vague and dim as the stir of a shadowed under world. The beauty of land wears an aspect of cold and strange remoteness. But when the boat has rocked you across the slip of troubled purple, from whose waves the foam slides backwards as from blocks of shining granite, the romantic charm vanishes. You have a vulgar little town instead of a vision of high-arched streets that throw wide banks of shadow along rivers of blinding light, of picturesque plazas and lovely patios. You have been carried on the crests of the laboring waves to a sordid quay, where coated ruffians loaf in quest of coin and gossip, without as much as a red sash or embroidered jacket or cloak among them. By and by, when the sun is up, and you go forth to examine the place, you are further surprised with its ugliness. But for the magnificent girdle of mountains of the deepest purple and the long roll of ocean, you would not even find its strangeness anything of a compensation for its meanness. For an adequate presentment of its varied encircling features you should, after you have looked at Nelson's captured flag in the cathedral, mount the belfry stairs, and there you will see a picture of wide and rocky barrancos, brilliant bits of green spaces, palms and camels accentuating the wild majesty of the mountains, enfoliaged plazas, the highroad to Laguna curving upward round broken meadows, here and there a pretty garden, and Gran Canaria outlined upon the pure sky like folds of soft cloud. Below ugly little lanes invite inspection under enchanting names, such as Calle de la Luz, Calle de la Cruz Verde; and the street of Castille leads to a dull plaza in front of the captain-general's establishment (the imaginative describe it as a palace), and from here queer passages skirt the under line of broken hill-paths,

and lead to a charming avenue of pepper-trees and oleanders, with high under-edges of red geraniums on both sides. From this point Santa Cruz presents a coquettish side view, with its Italian bell-towers, red-brown againsɩ the liquid intensity of blue, and an attractive edge of foliage along the rim of the terraces, while the red tiles and white walls under the open fan of the palms are not without a note of quaintness. Away to the verge of the heavens, a wavy world, with its violet and sullen moods, with none of Mediterranean's inland charm; none of its soft white bloom of mist, nor its gem-like glitter, nor its pearl-hued hours of melancholy. Out there lies the travelled highway, the old Spanish main. The Santa Maria, bearing its precious burden, captained as no other galleon yet had been, rocked upon its perilous billows and was cast windward upon these shores for repair. Here may have stood the leader of the exterminated race, puzzled by a sight so unaccountable as that corded stranger so gallantly bound for unknown ports, and Columbus, looking landwards, must have found food enough for his courageous mind in conjecture upon the inhabiting people. On one side come and go the vessels for South America, and on the other the great liners for New Zealand and the Gold Coast, while yachts and schooners glide in and out the insular sea-roads in a perpetual shifting of masts and sails.

The life of the plaza is unchanged, whether you sojourn on the Peninsula or in the Spanish colonies. Here may you sit within view of the pink-painted fort, and the modest house where Marshal O'Donnell, Duke of Tetuan, was born. Santa Cruz speaks contemptuously enough of the Peninsula. It looks towards Cadiz in sullen envy, and says that it has sent over men as great as any produced in Madrid. "We sent them O'Donnell, and they made a duke of him, but they might just as well have made him regent as that fool Espartero." It also sent Pérez Galdós, the popular novelist, and now the fishermen of the Canaries call their boats by his

name or the names of his favorite heroines. Not that they have read his books, but they regard him as having placed the haughty Peninsula under an obligation to them.

At all hours the plaza has its tale to tell. When the light is fading out of the heavens, you may sit and watch the manœuvres of the conquering officers pacing up and down, with their eye upon some form of subjugated womanhood, fiirting their canes or trailing their swords and gossiping between drinks at the café. Then the sea, in the glamour of sunset, takes on its evening beauty, and mystery creeps into the crude sapphire of the sky. On band nights it is too crowded, though it is always pleasant to hear laughter and social chatter, and watch smiling faces go by in groups. But it is best of all to see the plaza upon forsaken nights. Take the occasion of an unexpected invasion of the drama. Everybody who can afford it goes to the theatre, an edifice of mixed pretensions, where a musical conductor misconducts an inefficient orchestra, and raps out a thin bass accompaniment on a cracked piano, and a prompter irritates the gallery to mutiny by a too audible performance of his duty, while rows of female heads show in the boxes, elaborately decorated, smiling above the flutter of the eternal fan. Those who cannot afford this distraction, shut themselves up in their houses, prisoners of pride and their neighbors' opinion; for Santa Cruz is as proud as any hidalgo in decay. It would not have its poverty detected. You have the place to yourself. A new moon curls like a shred of silver upon the shadowy blue, and the warm and lucent stars shed a twilight above the town lights. Forms and profiles as they move about are oddly revealed, and the scene looks mediæval enough to be a legend or a mystery. You will see a man pass with the bright lining of his capa showing upon his shoulder with operatic grace, and the contrast of dusky beard and pallid cheek suggestive of Almaviva and other beguiling heroes of lattice and lute. Reality is clouded as if by

perfumed dust blown from star to star upon the salt-laden preezes of the sea. So warm is the air, so subtle the scent of brine, so illusive the quiver of the stars and the white shaving of a moon swimming in indigo, that if you happen to be neither blighted nor bored, you are ready enough to count yourself on the rim at least of the garden of Hesperides. Then should the hoarse thrum of a guitar come, carried upon the night wind from the pier below, where the sailors sit, rapping its amorous, unmelodious, insistent notes at judgment, with its thin sweet muffled charm, you are jerked into fancy's enchanted forest upon a sentimental thrill of senses in the blink of an eyelid. What is the sorcery of the guitar? It is the woodenest of instruments, and it lacks melody, yet we cannot hear it in cool blood. It possesses no body. Yet it has the peril of wine. Without art, it can set our pulses dancing. A couple of rough chords and a thin whine for treble, a hollow echo of wood and nimble fingers, broken bars of sweetness like the rainbow-hued bars cast by the sun on a summer tempest and swallowed in the valley of the waters as they recede and are gathered into mountains. Strange for the modern ear to sit on the plaza of a dull Altantic island, and listen to that crude and plaintive staccato, and those heartbroken chords, with their indescribable half-animal and hysterical charm. Some of the queer scraps of song seem to come from the throat of a sixteenthcentury Spaniard.

After musing by starlight on the plaza, your duty is to awake in the twilight of dawn, and then you will taste the untainted freshness of the air blown from Teide as an intoxication. This is the best hour for driving. Let your route be Orotava, that blest spot upon God's earth. You will be fronting the hills, after a cup of chocolate, by the time the sun has got well above the sealine, and melted all the pearly lights in a blaze of color. Mountain rolls beyond mountain, a shimmering revelation of upper worlds, of naked chasms, of wild fastnesses, and solitudes seemingly un

travelled by the foot of man. From Santa Cruz to Laguna, the old capital of Teneriffe, there is little to note. The foliage is scant and mean, with touches of silver where the sharp breeze in its vagabond course tears over the fields.

Laguna looks empty and cold; with moss-worked pavements that ring hollow to the tread of hoof. It wears a sad reminiscent air, as if it clung to the memories of capa and mantilla, and resented the infelicitous introduction of modern raiment among the wandering dons. There is something plaintive and engaging in these forsaken cities, and Laguna, now used as a summer abode for the people of Santa Cruz, up among her hills, has the proud consciousness of being her rival's superior in beauty and nobility of aspect, even in her dismantled condition. She at least has handsome decorated doorways and picturesque arches, and wears her air of fallen state with dignity. Close by you have the aromatic life of the woods, and the softening wonder of an opaline mist formed by the hot air of the coast breathed upward to this marshy eminence, and condensed to a thick veil which you can watch descend steadily and roll away over the plain. The trade-winds blowing round Laguna are changed from west to east; thus you will within an hour be suffocated at Santa Cruz and chilly up at Laguna. The Merced in the wood of Obispo outside Laguna is a spot almost as famous as the lovely valley of Orotava. To wander here is to drink deeply of bliss in an earthly paradise. Can this have been the spot of the garden of Hesperides? From this point begins the faint blue bloom of the eucalyptus upon the landscape, like a summer haze, and with it you are launched into the heart of the picturesque. Teide shows its dark peak under a hood of snow, and upon its rounded shoulders lies a mantle of broken snow-lines. Should there be a cloud, it will catch it on the wing, and leave it as ragged against the white spurs as a beggar's cloak. Away and around it, in violent contrast, the under hills make a girdle of sombre beauty relieved by spots of dazzling verdure.

Some bear upon tueir bluffs gashes of red earth, as crimson as the blotches on the dark shoulder of a wounded bull. The sea and sky are of a blue so soft and misted by the summer heat as to look like an interfusion of lights making a wall of liquid azure along the precipitous shore. Through this veil the sail of a boat shows, its brilliant whiteness subdued to silver, and you can scarce tell if it be a thing of earth or sky. For sound there is the song of the ocean, and the birds fling notes as thick as spray against your ear from the roadside trees. You breathe every vigorous and delicious odor from the pine woods that wander up the mountain sides; the perfumed shrubs and underwood of the ravines, and the paradisaical wilderness about you of heliotrope, roses, and sweet-peas that grow in Nature's hedges of tropic bloom.

If you are not of an exploring cast of mind, and have an aversion for the physical labor of scaling peaks, you may, at the villa of Orotava, repose contentedly, perched between the upper altitudes of this forested mountain-side, with the Port at your feet. Here may you dream amid every effect of loveliness; encircling hills, divinely formed and most divinely clad, with the frown of grey and purple rocks, the smiles of the pleasant fields, so lucidly green, the splendor of vegetation and gardens, any of which might have been the fitting home of our first parents; savage tor

rent-beds with armies of radiant flowers encroaching beyond the verges of their gloomy depths; enchanting paths under trees that the sunlight falls through in pools of glory upon the shadowed ground; glades and thickets. and ever in view the eternal ocean as glittering and purple as the Ægean waters.

The Peak itself from this point of view does not strike the imagination as one of the world's wonders; and the luxuriant orchards of the villa, and friendly solitude of the scented and open forest close by, speak with more eloquence to the indolent vagabond than Teide's tale of convulsed rocks and

lava-blackened and burnt earth. The villa is built on the slope of a hill, in a net-work of gardens and orchards like an Italian town. It is clean and pretty and picturesque, and the moss-sown streets wind up and down, always open to the eye of the flowers and the boom of the ocean. It has its own engaging note, if it lack both castellated and Moorish suggestion and the exquisite glow of color that charms us in old southern towns. It smiles mirthfully in is sunlit slumbers, and wears a fine hint of nobility in decay. Instead of historic columns, it offers you the hills, alive with the life of the woods, fragrant with nature's sweetest scents, and aglow with all her precious hues. And beyond the sharp dip of its base, through fields of corn and maize, in a tangle of rich vegetation, it shows you the long roll of foamy surf. It breathes content from earliest dawn till night turns the dusky woods to impenetrable shadow. Along the valley-way it invites you out of its bright little streets, through a succession of enjoyments. If you happen to be a first-class traveller, it points to the palatial hotel below at the Puerto, which, like Teide's peak, is an insistent note in the landscape.

There is, of course, the usual rivalry between the Villa and the Puerto. The Port looks up the hill, sniffs from a distance of two miles, and asserts that the Villa is unhealthy. The Villa glances down at the Port in pity, and points to its upper hilis as a sanative background. If the wiles of both appeal to you, you may build yourself a brand-new mansion along the lovely carretera which winds down from Villa to Puerto, and there be as happy as a grateful heart will permit. One ostensible eccentric from over seas labelled his caprice with an inscription that greets the eye as a foreign tongue: "This is the house that Jack built." The natives speak of him as Don Juan, and stare to find you do not recognize him for an acquaintance from the description. It would be waste of breath to point out that, except the man in the legend, not a living soul could be traced as simple Don Juan. In his native land

has

Shakespeare himself might walk undisturbed incognito as Mr. William. The people here are the friendliest I have ever met. Peasant women, whom I stopped to talk to, led me through some marvellous orchards and gardens, and gathered me stacks of flowers. I might have lived upon natural scents so thick with them was the air I breathed in my hotel room. I sat among roses, carnations, and heliotrope, in strange places, amongst wide-eyed foreigners, and, to please them, told the tale of my voyages. Men came out and joined us in wonder, and said "caraye" and "ave Maria purissima," and then they gave me cheese and coffee, and, weighted with my burden of flowers, somebody was sure to insist that I should go and see another garden down the carretera. It was delicious to break away, through acres of maize, with the tassels shaken against your cheek, swing in under the laden boughs of the fruit-trees, and move to spare the royal bloom of the pomegranate; jumping silver rills that make their own beds along the plantations as they trickle down from the hills.

I know nothing more cheering to the vagabond than this readiness of friendship among the common people. Go where you will abroad, you may shake the hand of beggar, loafer, peasant and cottager. All have the same free and hearty welcome for you. They seem to delight in outlandish acquaintance, and if you happen to be a woman, you instantly appeal to their better selves. Here, as elsewhere, I have kindly memories of people whose names I never knew, and who did not know mine. I remember driving by diligence with a brave and heroic-looking young gentleman beautifully clad. He wore long boots, radiant linen, velvet breeches, a short, smart jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat. Men of breeding might go as far as his native village to acquire his perfect manners. Wondering who this picturesque and operatic young man might be, I afterwards questioned the diligence driver (a rascal I had reason to suspect of stealing my bag with all my things, and the won

derful bargains in Orotava lace and embroidery I had driven), and learnt that he was a village butcher. So with all the tradespeople here. I wanted to match some stuff sold me by a woman of Orotava down at Santa Cruz, and was informed I should apply to Don Pablo or Don Pedro, and then to Don Nicholas of the Puerto. Surnames are suppressed-every one is still as wellborn as they were on the Peninsula in the days of Lope da Vega and the German ambassador, who, asking for a servant's credentials, was presented with proof of his descent from a Gothic king.

From The Cornhill Magazine. THE LOVE-LETTERS OF A POET. It was at Brussels, in the auction rooms at the corner of the streets Leopold and Wiertz, that the incident happened. My friend was an Englishman, but he had lived long in the country and had acquired a taste for the Belgian arts that seemed almost native, and that made him something of a collector. The sale at the rooms was to be very similar to a sale at Sotheby's, and the catalogue referred to original manuscripts and first editions, and to a hundred things loved by the curioso. My friend was present in the hope of securing some early engravings, and I was with him as part of the idleness of a holiday. We were early, and while awaiting the time of the sale we looked together at the catalogue, and he entertained me with talk of this and that entry.

"This number should be interesting," he said, pointing to a line on the first page, "the love-letters of Guitine, our poet of love. Keats's letters, you remember, were sold in London not long ago, and one of your versemakers wrote a lamenting sonnet. Guitine was not so great a poet as Keats, but his passion for Jetta Teterol was as wildly spoken as the other's for Fanny Brawne. Your versemaker was right; it is hard that because a man has

given part of his soul to the world the world should want the whole. But the curious are innocent of modesty; and yes, the number should be interesting."

"There will be a fight for the letters, you think?" I said.

"Yes, probably. Guitine has something of a vogue just now. The women are discovering that he wrote as in their best hours they think. And indeed it was a tender, womanly muse. The little man standing by the table→ him with the glasses I mean-will, I think, get them. He is a professor at the university, and doubtless meditates an article in one of the reviews. Himself without sentiment, he will criticise their sentiment. Already he has written more than one unkind thing about the Guitine morals; the letters will give him yet a new text."

For a moment or two I looked at the professor's hard, thin face, and sympathized with the dead poet; then, as the auctioneer mounted to his place and commenced the day's sale, I turned my eyes to one and another in the room. Mostly the crowd was of men, dealers or chance buyers, but here and there were women with the usual catalogue and pencil, and among them was one whose dress and manner interested me even to curiosity. Near to us she stood, impatiently buttoning and unbuttoning a glove, and I saw that she was pretty, but somewhat too well dressed, and somewhat too freely jewelled.

"Do you know," I asked my friend, "who is the girl a little to our right?" He looked, and slightly shrugged his shoulders, and said: "Yes. she is Marie Carbara, one of the actresses at the new theatre. This season she rides in the morning with the Baron Dégremont, next season she will ride with some one else. She is only a minor actress, but you see her cloak and the brooch clasping it. They are all alike these pretty singers and dancers; all love the sunshine and the butterfly life. What brings Marie here I do not know, nor what makes her so angry with her glove. The boudoir