as Thoreau alone has described, with here
and there an open glimpse of the sea far below, yet lifted up to an
apparent level with the clouds, so as to seem like an Arctic scene, with
patches of open water. Then we climbed through endless sheep-pastures
and over great slabs of lava, growing steeper and steeper; we entered
the crater at last, walled with snows of which portions might be of
untold ages, for it is never, I believe, wholly empty; we climbed,
in such a gale of wind that the guides would not follow us, the
steeple-like central pinnacle, two hundred feet high; and there we
reached, never to be forgotten, a small central crater at the very
summit, where steam poured up between the stones,--and, oh, from what
central earthy depths of wonder that steam came to us! There has been no
eruption from any portion of Pico for many years, but it is a volcano
still, and we knew that we were standing on the narrow and giddy summit
of a chimney of the globe. That was a sensation indeed!

We saw many another wild volcanic cliff and fissure and cave on our
two-days' tour round the island of Fayal; but it was most startling,
when, on the first morning, as we passed from green valley to valley
along the road, suddenly all verdure and life vanished, and we found
ourselves riding through a belt of white, coarse moss stretching from
mountain to sea, covering rock and wall and shed like snow or moonlight
or mountain-laurel or any other pale and glimmering thing; and when,
after miles of ignorant wonder, we rode out of it into greenness again,
and were told that we had crossed what the Portuguese call a _Misterio_
or Mystery,--the track of the last eruption. The moss was the first
primeval coating of vegetation just clothing those lava-rocks again.

But the time was coming when we must bid good-bye to picturesque
Fayal. We had been there from November to May; it had been a winter of
incessant rains, and the first necessary of life had come to be a change
of umbrellas; it had been colder than usual, making it a comfort to look
at our stove, though we never lighted it; but our invalids had gained
by even this degree of mildness, by the wholesome salt dampness, by
the comforts of our hotel with its respectable Portuguese landlord and
English landlady, and by the great kindness shown us by all others. At
last we had begun to feel that we had squeezed the orange of the Azores
a little dry, and we were ready to go. And when, after three we