vilization has
skipped.

Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
that if he keeps his contract, and does not die, it will be three
years before he again sees his home. So our departure was not
enlivening, and, in the smoking-room, the exiles prepared us for
lonely ports of call, for sickening heat, for swarming multitudes of
blacks.

In consequence, when we passed Finisterre, Spain, which from New
York seems almost a foreign country, was a near neighbor, a dear
friend. And the Island of Teneriffe was an anticlimax. It was as
though by a trick of the compass we had been sailing southwest and
were entering the friendly harbor of Ponce or Havana.

Santa Cruz, the port town of Teneriffe, like La Guayra, rises at the
base of great hills. It is a smiling, bright-colored, red-roofed,
typical Spanish town. The hills about it mount in innumerable
terraces planted with fruits and vegetables, and from many of these
houses on the hills, should the owner step hurriedly out of his
front door, he would land upon the roof of his nearest neighbor.
Back of this first chain of hills are broad farming lands and
plateaus from which Barcelona and London are fed with the earliest
and the most tender of potatoes that appear in England at the same
time Bermuda potatoes are being printed in big letters on the bills
of fare along Broadway. Santa Cruz itself supplies passing steamers
with coal, and passengers with lace work and post cards; and to the
English in search of sunshine, with a rival to Madeira. It should be
a successful rival, for it is a charming place, and on the day we
were there the thermometer was at 72 deg., and every one was complaining
of the cruel severity of the winter. In Santa Cruz one who knows
Spanish America has but to shut his eyes and imagine himself back in
Santiago de Cuba or Caracas. There are the same charming plazas, the
yellow churches and towered cathedral, the long iron-barred windows,
glimpses through marble-paved halls of cool patios, the same open
shops one finds in Obispo and O'Reilly Streets, the idle officers
with smart uniforms and swinging swords in front of cafes killing
time and digestion with sweet drinks, and over the garden walls
great bunches of purple and scarlet flowers and sheltering palms.
The show place in Santa Cruz is the church in which are stored the
relics of the sea-fight in which, as a young man, Nelson lost his
arm and England also lost two battleflags