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February 28. Last night and to-day it has been blowing a gale from the south-west, such as we have not yet experienced since our voyage. The waves, as they roll in, curl over like waterfalls, and the colour of the falling water, before it breaks into foam, is a light yellowish green. In a bay to the west, single waves broke in an uninterrupted line of a mile in length, and the bay was filled with foam, which looked like drifted snow, rather than water. Some of the thundering breakers, that are booming against the little island opposite to our windows, dash their spray completely over its side; a height of three or four hundred feet. A poet, I think it is the Corn-law Rhymer, has likened this glorious booming of the stormy ocean on a rocky coast, to "A dreadful ode on Ocean's drowned."

Leaving the shore for the town, we looked into several cottages and chatted with their goodhumoured inmates. In one of these I saw, to my great surprise, a print of Alderman Wood fixed to the black lava wall. The print, which was as big as half a newspaper, was a coarse woodcut, changing the respectable aldermanic face, which cannot fail to belong to so worthy a functionary, into a visage so ungentle and grim as almost

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to justify the woman's answer to my query of Whose face is that, Senhora ?"-"Ah! Senhor, he ó diabo."-(Why, sir, 't is the devil.)

Cer

March 1.-There is not a single book-shop in St. Michael's, and we are told that not one is to be found in either of the islands. Those who buy books send to England, or America, or Lisbon for them. The British and Foreign Bible Society in England sent some Portuguese Bibles here some years ago; but it is said that they remained in the custom-house until they were decayed, (which, as the custom-house is near the sea, and things easily spoil by damp, might speedily be the case,) and that they were afterwards removed, it is not known where. tainly, with the exception of my own Testament, which I lost, very unaccountably, soon after landing, I have not seen a single Portuguese version of the Bible since I have been here. In a cottage into which we went the other day were a beautifully printed French copy of Virgil, an odd volume of the Odes of Horace, with a French prose translation, three grammars of the French, Latin, and Portuguese languages; one or two theological works in Portuguese, with as many short stories of no apparent religious or political tendency,

and a French translation of Eschylus. They belonged to some pains-taking youth, who might probably have been reading for the church, and who, with this tendency upon him, begged of us, through his servant, a pair of gloves of “a sad colour," to wear in the Good Friday procession.

The most efficient way of distributing the Scriptures through the Azores, and one which, if within the scope of Bible societies, should be adopted in preference to such a fruitless consignment of books as appears to have been made in past years, would be to employ well qualified persons to make excursions through the islands, for the purpose of reading the Scriptures themselves to the poor. We were told by a lady who had given a Portuguese Testament to one of her servants, that when they had leisure they handed the book to one of their number who could read best, and listened with eager avidity to some of the simple Scripture narratives, particularly to the parables, and the description of the sufferings and crucifixion of Christ; exclaiming frequently, "how beautiful!”

March 2.-The prison-window of the gaol in this town opens on the street, and as the men within appear to be amusing fellows, it is a

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lounge for idlers during the greater part of the day. Incarceration here seems to be both an amusing and a healthful condition, - there are no clogs on the body or the spirits, no daily tread on an undershot wheel, -no dead lights or boarded funnels,—no simple views of blank walls and infinite space; but, in place of these, the graceful and amusing society of friends, a free circulation of air and ideas, an interchange of civilities on equal terms between the bond and the free, an uninterrupted prospect of a lively wine-shop and frequented streets, the news of the day from authentic sources, and the same supply of nuts and good things from those outside the grating to those within, as entertains the prisoners of the genus simia in other parts of the world; in fact, there appear to be so many agreeable comforts attending a prison life, that a gaol in Villa Franca is just the sort of place in which a decayed Portuguese pauper might laudably wish to end his days. I have before mentioned the universal and punctilious politeness of the Azoreans, "Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris." But at this gaol window it is carried to its ultimatum. The prisoners who gaze and gossip through the bars bow and bend as

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respectfully, and are capped in return with precisely the same deference as they would be if they walked the streets. Imprisonment seems to be neither a disgrace nor a humiliation to them. There is no diminution in the every-day round of salutations; but the "hat-worship" (as George