no vehicles and no horses, but an endless stream of little donkeys,
clicking the rough pavement beneath their sharp hoofs, and thumped
solidly by screaming drivers. Who wears the new shoes on the island does
not appear; but the hens limp about the houses, tethered to the old
ones.

Further inspection reveals new marvels. The houses are roofed with red
and black tiles, semi-cylindrical in shape and rusty in surface, and
making the whole town look as if incrusted with barnacles. There is
never a pane of glass on the lower story, even for the shops, but only
barred windows and solid doors. Every house has a paved court-yard for
the ground-floor, into which donkeys may be driven and where beggars or
peasants may wait, and where one naturally expects to find Gil Blas in
one corner and Sancho Panza in another. An English lady, on arriving,
declared that our hotel was only a donkey-stable, and refused to enter
it. In the intervals between the houses the streets are lined with solid
stone walls from ten to twenty feet high, protecting the gardens behind;
and there is another stone wall inclosing the town on the water side,
as if to keep the people from being spilled out. One must go some miles
into the country before getting beyond these walls, or seeing an inch,
on either side. This would be intolerable, of course, were the country
a level; but, as every rod of ground slopes up or down, it simply seems
like walking through a series of roofless ropewalks or bowling-alleys,
each being tilted up at an angle, so that one sees the landscape through
the top, but never over the sides. Thus, walking or riding, one seldom
sees the immediate foreground, but a changing background of soft
valleys, an endless patchwork of varied green rising to the mountains in
the interior of the island, or sinking to the blue sea, beyond which the
mountain Pico rears its graceful outline across the bay.