ximum of material on a minimum of
basement. They simply represent an incident in the perpetual war
against the stones, and show the way in which crude minds attain their
ends. If Minorca had been peopled by Americans (as once, indeed, nearly
happened), light tramways would be laid down in every direction, and
the stones carted to the edges of the island, and there tipped into the
sea; and then the ground would be free, the farmer rich and unhappy.
But as matters are ordered at present, these things are beyond the man
of the soil's grasp; and so he remains poor and hard-working and
contented.

The broad road led on past whitewashed farm-houses and pink-flowered
almond gardens, past peasants and mule-teams scratching up the rocky
soil with primitive one-handled ploughs, past patches of brown
vine-stumps and gnarled olive-trees squirming out from among the
boulders; and close on either hand ran the low wooded hills, with their
burden of ilexes still filmy with the morning mists. The road was a
road a London suburb might have felt pride in, so smart was the
engineering that made cuttings and embankments to reduce the gradients,
and culverts to carry off the side-water, and dressed freestone bridges
to cross the many streamlets. But at the eighth kilometre post (I think
it was the eighth) this road showed itself worthy of the sunny
government of Spain by ending abruptly in a fence of wheelbarrows and
gang-planks. The continuation was to be gone on with, _manana_;
meanwhile young wheat had sprouted eight green inches in the track.

At this point the diligence course to Ciudadella branches off to the
northward, turning again after a while due west on to General
Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon
it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many
windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly
pear. There were few houses to stop the view--only some two or three
farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer
either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's roof.
But the high walls and the hummocks shut one in, and I was perpetually
having to climb one or the other to make sure of my whereabouts, for my
sailing directions to the Talayot had been rather vague ones.

The air was still and close, and already the sun had crept high and was
burning fiercely. It was blazing hot, but in spite of that, and the
ruggedness of