rst of these is
clipped down to the last word, which is pronounced "T[=a][=i]n-g[)a]."
After dark it becomes _Bon nit_, or _Bon nit tenga_, according
to social standing.

I refilled my pipe and looked around me. Old Lully had shown some
_nous_ in choosing a country to carry his secret. There is small
fear of Minorca's population ever growing excessive. Not even Connemara
can show such stone heaps. The walls which divide up the tiny fields
are often ten feet thick; there are rubble cairns on all the many
outcrops of rock; there are boulder-girdles round the trees; and yet,
despite these collections, the corn and the beans and the grass grow
more in stone than soil. One almost wonders that the Minorcan does not
build up stone circles round the cows' legs whilst they are grazing.
Perhaps the _Doctor Illuminatus_ might have hesitated if his
prophetic eye had seen an invasion of British; for the Briton is a
destructive animal with pig-like instincts of rootling up everything.
But the foreigner's tenure of the soil (and stones) was not a long one,
and I fancy that the country's face, save for some of the better roads
that seam it, is much the same as it was in the year of our Lord
thirteen hundred and nothing.

Now, the Minorcan is not possessed of the slenderest reverence for the
prehistoric monuments that spot his island, and if he wanted them for
domestic purposes, he would not hesitate to take the top from a
duolithic stone altar, or the roofing flags from a subterranean
gallery. And he would quarry from the pyramids to find the wherewithal
for his pig-yard gateposts without the smallest flush of shame, for
vandalism is a word that has no Minorquin equivalent. But the abundance
of stone elsewhere has saved the fashioned stone that those dead races
piled up when this world was young, and the gray Talayots squat upon
their old sites in undiminished numbers. Indeed, in a way, one might
say that there are more of them now than there were in the venerable
alchemist's time, for spurious Talayots may be seen in every direction.
These latter-day edifices have one advantage over the hoary prototypes.
Their purpose is clearly defined. We know that they were not intended
for the burial-places of kings, or for temples to conceal sacerdotal
rights, or for observatories, or even for granaries. They were simply
run up by men who wanted to build shelters for cattle or pigs or sheep
on some plan which would expend a ma