92 TEE CRUISE OF THE "CACHALOT.'' 



hewn out of the solid rock, leading, as we were told, to the 

 cultivated terraces above. These reached an elevation 

 of about a thousand feet. Above all towered the great, 

 dominating peak, the summit lost in the clouds eight 

 or nine thousand feet above. The rock-hewn roads and 

 cultivated land certainly gave the settlement an old- 

 established appearance, which was not surprising, seeing 

 that it has been inhabited for more than a hundred 

 years. I shall always bear a grateful recollection of the 

 place, because my host gave me what I had long been a 

 stranger to — a good, old-fashioned English dinner of 

 roast beef and baked potatoes. He apologized for having 

 no plum-pudding to crown the feast. "But, you see," 

 he said, "we kaint grow no corn hyar, and we'm clean run 

 out ov flour ; hev ter make out on taters 's best we kin." 

 I sincerely sympathized with him on the lack of bread- 

 stuff among them, and wondered no longer at the avidity 

 with which they had munched our flinty biscuits on first 

 coming aboard. His wife, a buxom, motherly woman of 

 about fifty, of dark, olive complexion, but good features, 

 was kindness itself; and their three youngest children, 

 who were at home, could not, in spite of repeated warn- 

 ings and threats, keep their eyes off me, as if I had been 

 some strange animal dropped from the moon. I felt very 

 unwilling to leave them so soon, but time was pressing, 

 the stores we had come for were all ready to ship, and I 

 had to tear myself away from these kindly entertainers. 

 I declare, it seemed like parting with old friends ; yet our 

 acquaintance might have been measured by minutes, so 

 brief it had been. The mate had purchased a fine 

 bullock, which had been slaughtered and cut up for us 

 with great celerity, four or five dozen fowls (alive), four 

 or five sacks of potatoes, eggs, etc., so that we were 



