26 EXCURSIONS IN MADEIRA 



The little cabin, which contrasts its cheerful colour to the 

 gloomy tint and bUstered aspect of the basaltic caverns, on whose 

 margin it seems to totter, and the crumbling scoria? of whose 

 vaults, appear to hang together so loosely, as to be ready to sink 

 beneath its weight, and to bury it in cinders ; this little hvit, 

 erected as it were on the ruins of a former world, rocked by every 

 wind, and dashed by every southern surge, is inhabited by a poor 

 maniac, who, being robbed, by a brother, of all the savings of a hfe 

 of labour, at the very moment the old age they were to solace 

 began to creep upon him, lost his reason, not, as might have been 

 expected, to revile that providence, which for some wise reason 

 we might have excused one of his class from crediting, had failed 

 to protect him, but peaceably, and without harming the most insig- 

 nificant object about him, to raise rude altars to his God, and to 

 deck his garden-wall with crowns of thorns, in honour of his 

 Kedeemer, and rudely cut stones (for they could scarcely be called 

 figures), in memory of his Apostles. A vacant smile played for a 

 moment on his sad face, as I stopped to examine, and as he 

 thought, to admire these highly-prized ornaments of his dwelling, 

 which seemed to be richer in this respect, in his eye, than the 

 most splendid cathedral; and the look of distress and emotion, 

 which followed the unwonted smile my ^respectful forbearance had 

 induced, when a troop of idle boys discharged a volley of stones 

 from the beach, and destroyed the greater number of the rude 

 images he had raised with so much labour and so devoutly revered ; 

 the look he gave me at this moment of wanton cruelty, went to 

 my heart. This was not the mania which too often follows a 

 blind and gross superstition, it was the pure, natural, and volun- 



rocks, with several others of the genus ; one was of a dull light green, with blackish 

 brown stripes, and another of a dull grey spotted with brown, with the apex lighter. 

 The branchiae of the animals of these patella were not interrupted, and all are eaten. 



