of the rock itself, whirled away over the
foaming ocean. The orange-orchards were rather a disappointment; they
suggested quince-trees 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 rat