darkened windows, but clear away also these darkening walls, and show us
that the simplest religion is the best!

I cannot dwell upon the narrative of our many walks:--to the
Espalamarca, with its lonely telegraph-station;--to the Burnt Mountain,
with its colored cliffs;--to visit the few aged nuns who still linger
in what was once a convent;--to Porto Pim, with its curving Italian
beach, its playing boys and picturesque fishermen beneath the arched
gateway;--to the tufa-ledges near by, where the soft rocks are
honeycombed with the cells hollowed by echini below the water's edge, a
fact undescribed and almost unexampled, said Agassiz afterwards;--to the
lofty, lonely Monte da Guia, with its solitary chapel on the peak, and
its extinct crater, where the sea rolls in and out;--to the Dabney
orange-gardens, on Sunday afternoons;--to the beautiful Mirante ravine,
whenever a sudden rain filled the cascades and set the watermills and
the washerwomen all astir, and the long brook ran down in whirls of
white foam to the waiting sea;--or to the western shores of the island,
where we turned to Ariadnes, as we watched departing home-bound vessels
from those cliffs whose wave-worn fiords and innumerable sea-birds make
a Norway of Fayal.

And I must also pass over still greater things:--the winter storms
and ship-wrecks, whose annals were they not written to the "New York
Tribune"?--and the spring Sunday at superb Castello Branco, with the
whole rural population thronging to meet in enthusiastic affection the
unwonted presence of the Consul himself, the feudalism of love;--and the
ascent of the wild Caldeira, we climbing height after height, leaving
the valleys below mottled with blue-robed women spreading their white
garments to dry in the sun, and the great Pico peeping above the clouds
across the bay, and seeming as if directly above our heads, and nodding
to us ere it drew back again;--and, best of all, that wonderful
ascension, by two of us, of Pico itself, seven thousand feet from the
level of the sea, where we began to climb. We camped half-way up, and
watched the sunset over the lower peaks of Fayal; we kindled fires of
_faya_-bushes on the lonely mountain-sides, a beacon for the world; we
slept in the loft of a little cattle-shed, with the calves below us,
"the cows' sons," as our Portuguese attendant courteously called them;
we waked next morning above the clouds, with one vast floor of white
level vapor beneath us, such