CHAPTER II

"ISLE OF BEAUTY"

Where the clouds love to rest

On the mountain's full breast,

As they wander afar o'er the isles of the sea."

BEYOND all the islands of the Azores I had been curious to see San Miguel. Here were the great lava quarries and breakwater of huge bulk and length, partly swept away in 1896 by a tremendous tidal wave. Here also were the famous pine-apple gardens, the Tangerine orange groves, the seven cities of the Cid, buried in the crater lakes of Sette Cidades and the famed valley of the Furnas. Sometime during the night we anchored in the roadstead. When, early in the morning, I came on deck I saw with pleasure and admiration the city of Ponta Delgada. Perched on a commanding elevation was the crimson-painted church of St. Joseph. To our left was the historic old fort, hoary with age, bastioned, moated and painfully helpless in its senility. Occupying almost an entire square towered the Matriz, the finest church of the Azores, the splendid hospital buildings and the military barracks.

When I entered the city with its population of seventeen or eighteen thousand people I was at once struck with its quaint composite architecture, its

air of prosperity and scrupulous cleanliness. The private homes and many of them are palatial—the stores, the public and civic buildings are of eruptive stone coated in cement stained or dyed in variegated colours. In the city, and indeed on the whole island, there are but four or five English-speaking residents. To one of these, the Hon. George Pickril, the American consul, I bore a letter of introduction. With gracious cordiality he bade me welcome, posted me at the club and secured for me excellent quarters at the "Azor," the only hotel in the city. Accompanied by senhor Moreira I drove, a few days after landing on the island, to Morro dos Capellas, a bold and rugged headland towering sixteen hundred feet above the sea, to whose waters the cleavage is as straight and clean as that of the granite front of Cape Trinity, on the Saguenay. At the base of this rocky promontory is a cove formed by centuries of wave erosion, where the government has established a whaling-station from which thirty thousand gallons of whale oil were last year exported. Night and day from the plane of the headland a "lookout" with a marine glass sweeps the sea to the north, ready at a moment to telephone to the men of the cove the appearance and position of the ocean Our road from Ponta Delgada to Capellas was as symmetrically crooked as a stake and rider fence of the pioneer days of Ontario. It led through a wondrous panorama, passing rocks festooned with ivy, ravines carpeted with ferns and lava boulders robed in lichens. The wayside is redolent of rhodo

monsters.