induce her to leave the Caldeiras, where, with her father, she will spend the remainder of her days. She could say a few words of English; and among them the emphatic sentence which expressed her determination never to leave St. Michael's; "Não, Senhor; me no go bode sheep; não, Senhor." She is well fitted to be a guide to the beauties of the Caldeiras ; and a more willing or more cheerful one it would be difficult to find. She directed us to a dripping cavern in the mountains, to which the islanders have given the appropriate name of Lagrimas, or Tears. The roof of the cave was lined with delicate ferns and fine moss, from the ends of which the purest water dripped and trickled, falling like rain upon a thick bed of moss, where it formed a small crystal rivulet, flowing down the mountain side into the Ribeira Grande, which pursued a noisier and rougher course, over stones and pebbles in the ravine, and, after passing through the town of that name, was lost in the sea. The spot was very cheerful hum of the solitary, except that the stream beneath our feet abated somewhat from its loneliness. But, besides this, there was no thing but the light morning sky, chequered with thin mists, the sober green mountains, and the dull grey sheets of lava which intersected them. Even the few mountain paths, winding their lonely way up the sides of the ravine until they were hidden by the heath and box through which they passed, were destitute of a single ass, with his green burden and merry driver. Maria and her father, and the old man who attends to the baths, are the only persons who live in the Caldeiras at this period of the winter. There is a very marked difference between the climate here and that at Villa Franca, or even at Ribeira Grande, which is dry and free from rain, while we are dripping from the cold mountain showers. In the summer-time the inhabitants of Ribeira Grande, who own houses in the crater, come here for the benefit of the baths, instead of going to the Furnas; and even now a party of noisy young men with towels in their pockets, have ridden over to the baths in the afternoon; and, after enlivening the spot with their own voices, and the congenial bray of their dapples," have spread their towels on their own backs to dry, and have trotted back again. 66 The bath-house, which has been built by the town's-people at Ribeira Grande for the good of MANOEL PASCHECO. 269 the public, and is open at all hours of the day for their accommodation, is a long building, like a double coach-house, and is divided into four compartments, in each of which a bath, six feet by three, has been sunk in the floor. Each apartment is paved, and each bath lined with a rough, honeycombed, scoriaceous stone, which time and water, and the backs of bathers, have worn sufficiently smooth to suit all but the most fastidious skins. Above the baths is an oval pond of white mud, which is filled partly by hot water rising in the mud, and partly by means of hot, and tepid and cold springs in other parts of the crater, the waters of which are collected in a smaller pond, and let into the larger to warm, as occasion may require. When pond, number one, is filled for use, the contents resemble warm milk and water, wherein gas and steam are blowing constant bladders, which float lazily along the surface, and at length burst and form a creamy scum. Old Manoel Pascheco, the bathing-house keeper, who seems to belong as completely to the little crater in which he lives as if he had been cast up among the lava and pumice when the volcano was opened, is the person who officiates for you. He walks with 270 MANOEL PASCHECO. his hoe on his shoulder to a stone shutter in the larger pond, removes or loosens a plug, and draws off into a stone gutter the requisite quantum of liquor. He then retraces his steps to the bath-house, and, by the time he has arrived there, the stream, which has flowed along a small channel at the back of the building, is tumbling and frothing into the bath. Manoel doffs his roomy and untanned leather boots, descends into the water, and, with a rough broom of green heath, sweeps the sides and bottom of the bath, scrapes the grits into the corner, closes the hole with a turf and stone, hoists his knee over the edge, crawls out, takes his seat in the sun until such time as the bath shall be ready, and slowly resumes his boots. The bath being at length filled, he shuts up the plug, removes his carapuça, and politely tells you that your bath is ready, and, moreover, is a very good one. This is the process which old Manoel contentedly repeats day by day, as fresh bathers come to the springs ; occupying the intervals of his daily labours by banking up the sides of his pond with mud and turf, keeping clear, with his well-worn hoe, the streams which supply his pond, gossiping with Maria and the work-people, eating his frugal |