Leaves from a Madeira Garden 



mostly of the laurel tribe, and under favour- 

 able conditions are of great size and doubtless 

 of great age. Beneath their shade, and on 

 their trunks, ferns and mosses flourish in 

 unbridled luxuriance. The traveller receives 

 a just and agreeable impression of being 

 surrounded by those primeval conditions, un- 

 affected by man's handiwork, which are ever 

 becoming rarer in the more easily accessible 

 portions of the world's surface. The majority 

 of these valleys are rarely trodden by civilized 

 man. A visit to them necessitates sleeping at 

 one of the villages on the north coast, where 

 accommodation is still very limited and primi- 

 tive ; and owing to the absence of demand it 

 seems rather to have deteriorated than advanced 

 during recent years. 



Much of the finest scenery of Madeira is 

 rendered accessible to the adventurous through 

 the levadas^ or channels, by which water is 

 collected in the higher hills and brought down 

 to irrigate the lower regions. They are com- 

 monly cut out of the rock, or built of masonry, 

 on the steep hillsides, and the watercourse is 

 usually protected by a parapet about eighteen 

 inches wide. Their construction must often 



50 



