Santa Cruz to Laguna, the old capital of Teneriffe, there is little to note. The foliage is scant and mean, with touches of silver where the sharp breeze in its vagabond course tears over the fields.

The

Laguna looks empty and cold; with moss-worked pavements that ring hollow to the tread of hoof. It wears a sad reminiscent air, as if it clung to the memories of capa and mantilla, and resented the infelicitous introduction of modern raiment among the wandering dons. There is something plaintive and engaging in these forsaken cities, and Laguna, now used as a summer abode for the people of Santa Cruz, up among her hills, has the proud consciousness of being her rival's superior in beauty and nobility of aspect, even in her dismantled condition. She at least has handsome decorated doorways and picturesque arches, and wears her air of fallen state with dignity. Close by you have the aromatic life of the woods, and the softening wonder of an opaline mist formed by the hot air of the coast breathed upward to this marshy eminence, and condensed to a thick veil which you can watch descend steadily and roll away over the plain. trade-winds blowing round Laguna are changed from west to east; thus you will within an hour be suffocated at Santa Cruz and chilly up at Laguna. The Merced in the wood of Obispo outside Laguna is a spot almost as famous as the lovely valley of Orotava. To wander here is to drink deeply of bliss in an earthly paradise. Can this have been the spot of the garden of Hesperides? From this point begins the faint blue bloom of the eucalyptus upon the landscape, like a summer haze, and with it you are launched into the heart of the picturesque. Teide shows its dark peak under a hood of snow, and upon its rounded shoulders lies a mantle of broken snow-lines. Should there be a cloud, it will catch it on the wing, and leave it as ragged against the white spurs as a beggar's cloak. Away and around it, in violent contrast, the under hills make a girdle of sombre beauty relieved by spots of dazzling verdure.

red earth, as crimson as the blotches on the dark shoulder of a wounded bull. The sea and sky are of a blue so soft and misted by the summer heat as to look like an interfusion of lights making a wall of liquid azure along the precipitous shore. Through this veil the sail of a boat shows, its brilliant white. ness subdued to silver, and you can scarce tell if it be a thing of earth or sky. For sound there is the song of the ocean, and the birds fling notes as thick as spray against your ear from the roadside trees. You breathe every vigorous and delicious odor from the pine woods that wander up the mountain sides; the perfumed shrubs and underwood of the ravines, and the paradisaical wilderness about you of heliotrope, roses, and sweet-peas that grow in Nature's hedges of tropic bloom.

If you are not of an exploring cast of mind, and have an aversion for the physical labor of scaling peaks, you may, at the villa of Orotava, repose contentedly, perched between the upper altitudes of this forested mountain-side, with the Port at your feet. Here may you dream amid every effect of loveliness; encircling hills, divinely formed and most divinely clad, with the frown of grey and purple rocks, the smiles of the pleasant fields, so lucidly green, the splendor of vegetation and gardens, any of which might have been the fitting home of our first parents; savage torrent-beds with armies of radiant flowers encroaching beyond the verges of their gloomy depths; enchanting paths under trees that the sunlight falls through in pools of glory upon the shadowed ground; glades and thickets. and ever in view the eternal ocean as glittering and purple as the waters.

The Peak itself from this point of view does not strike the imagination as one of the world's wonders; and the luxuriant orchards of the villa, and friendly solitude of the scented and open forest close by, speak with more eloquence to the indolent vagabond than Teide's tale of convulsed rocks and

lava-blackened and burnt earth. The villa is built on the slope of a hill, in a net-work of gardens and orchards like an Italian town. It is clean and pretty and picturesque, and the moss-sown streets wind up and down, always open to the eye of the flowers and the boom of the ocean. It has its own engaging note, if it lack both-castellated and Moorish suggestion and the exquisite glow of color that charms us in old southern towns. It smiles mirthfully in lus sunlit slumbers, and wears a fine hint of nobility in decay. Instead of historic columns, it offers you the hills, alive with the life of the woods, fragrant with nature's sweetest scents, and aglow with all her precious hues. And beyond the sharp dip of its base, through fields of corn and maize, in a tangle of rich vegetation, it shows you the long roll of foamy surf. It breathes content from earliest dawn till night turns the dusky woods to impenetrable shadow. Along the valley-way it invites you out of its bright little streets, through a succession of enjoyments. If you happen to be a first-class traveller, it points to the palatial hotel below at the Puerto, which, like Teide's peak, is an insistent note in the landscape.

There is, of course, the usual rivalry between the Villa and the Puerto. The Port looks up the hill, sniffs from a distance of two miles, and asserts that the Villa is unhealthy. The Villa glances down at the Port in pity, and points to its upper hilis as a sanative background. If the wiles of both appeal to you, you may build yourself a brand-new mansion along the lovely carretera which winds down from Villa to Puerto, and there be as happy as a grateful heart will permit. One ostensible eccentric from over seas has labelled his caprice with an inscription that greets the eye as a foreign tongue: "This is the house that Jack built." The natives speak of him as Don Juan, and stare to find you do not recognize him for an acquaintance from the description. It would be waste of breath to point out that, except the man in the legend, not a living soul could be traced as simple Don Juan. In his native land

Shakespeare himself might walk undisturbed incognito as Mr. William. The people here are the friendliest I have ever met. Peasant women, whom I stopped to talk to, led me through some marvellous orchards and gardens, and gathered me stacks of flowers. I might have lived upon natural scents so thick with them was the air I breathed in my hotel room. I sat among roses, carnations, and heliotrope, in strange places, amongst wide-eyed foreigners, and, to please them, told the tale of my voyages. Men came out and joined us in wonder, and said "caraye" and "ave Maria purissima," and then they gave me cheese and coffee, and, weighted with my burden of flowers, somebody was sure to insist that I should go and see another garden down the carretera. It was delicious to break away, through acres of maize, with the tassels shaken against your cheek, swing in under the laden boughs of the fruit-trees, and move to spare the royal bloom of the pomegranate; jumping silver rills that make their own beds along the plantations as they trickle down from the hills.

I know nothing more cheering to the vagabond than this readiness of friendship among the common people. Go where you will abroad, you may shake the hand of beggar, loafer, peasant and cottager. All have the same free and hearty welcome for you. They seem to delight in outlandish acquaintance, and if you happen to be a woman, you instantly appeal to their better selves. Here, as elsewhere, I have kindly memories of people whose names I never knew, and who did not know mine. I remember driving by diligence with a brave and heroic-looking young gentleman beautifully clad. He wore long boots, radiant linen, velvet breeches, a short, smart jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat. Men of breeding might go as far as his native village to acquire his perfect manners. Wondering who this picturesque and operatic young man might be, I afterwards questioned the diligence driver (a rascal I had reason to suspect of stealing my bag with all my things, and the won

derful bargains in Orotava lace and embroidery I had driven), and learnt that he was a village butcher. So with all the tradespeople here. I wanted to match some stuff sold me by a woman of Orotava down at Santa Cruz, and was informed I should apply to Don Pablo or Don Pedro, and then to Don Nicholas of the Puerto. Surnames are suppressed-every one is still as wellborn as they were on the Peninsula in the days of Lope da Vega and the German ambassador, who, asking for a servant's credentials, was presented with proof of his descent from a Gothic king.

From The Cornhill Magazine. THE LOVE-LETTERS OF A POET. It was at Brussels, in the auction rooms at the corner of the streets Leopold and Wiertz, that the incident happened. My friend was an Englishman, but he had lived long in the country and had acquired a taste for the Belgian arts that seemed almost native, and that made him something of a collector. The sale at the rooms was to be very similar to a sale at Sotheby's, and the catalogue referred to original manuscripts and first editions, and to a hundred things loved by the curioso. My friend was present in the hope of securing some early engravings, and I was with him as part of the idleness of a holiday. We were early, and while awaiting the time of the sale we looked together at the catalogue, and he entertained me with talk of this and that entry.

"This number should be interesting," he said, pointing to a line on the first page, "the love-letters of Guitine, our poet of love. Keats's letters, you remember, were sold in London not long ago, and one of your versemakers wrote a lamenting sonnet. Guitine was not so great a poet as Keats, but his passion for Jetta Teterol was as wildly spoken as the other's for Fanny Brawne. Your versemaker was right; it is hard that because a man has

given part of his soul to the world the world should want the whole. But the curious are innocent of modesty; and yes, the number should be interesting."

"There will be a fight for the letters, you think?" I said.

"Yes, probably. Guitine has something of a vogue just now. The women are discovering that he wrote as in their best hours they think. And indeed it was a tender, womanly muse. The little man standing by the tablehim with the glasses I mean-will, I think, get them. He is a professor at the university, and doubtless meditates an article in one of the reviews. Himself without sentiment, he will criticise their sentiment. Already he has written more than one unkind thing about the Guitine morals; the letters will give him yet a new text."

For a moment or two I looked at the professor's hard, thin face, and sympathized with the dead poet; then, as the auctioneer mounted to his place and commenced the day's sale, I turned my eyes to one and another in the room. Mostly the crowd was of men, dealers or chance buyers, but here and there were women with the usual catalogue and pencil, and among them was one whose dress and manner interested me even to curiosity. Near to us she stood, impatiently buttoning and unbuttoning a glove, and I saw that she was pretty, but somewhat too well dressed, and somewhat too freely jewelled.

"Do you know," I asked my friend, "who is the girl a little to our right?" He looked, and slightly shrugged his shoulders, and said: "Yes. she is Marie Carbara, one of the actresses at the new theatre. This season she rides in the morning with the Baron Dégremont, next season she will ride with some one else. She is only a minor actress, but you see her cloak and the brooch clasping it. They are all alike these pretty singers and dancers; all love the sunshine and the butterfly life. What brings Marie here I do not know, nor what makes her SO angry with her glove. The boudoir

"Pardon, but if I may I will have them now. Will you give them me, please. Here are notes for the amount -two of a thousand and one of five hundred. There is no objection?"

"There is no objection," replied the auctioneer smilingly. "It is not quite usual, but there can be no objection." Then to his clerk he said, "Take the notes, please, and give Mademoiselle Carbara the letters. Mademoiselle Carbara we all know and admire. Certainly she may have them."

As the girl took the bundle and loosened the string which bound it, there were probably none in the room who were not gazing at her. Most, like myself, were amazed at her eagerness; one or two were a little contemptuous; the professor was resentfully frowning. Nearer to her than some I stood, and so better than some I can tell what in the next minutes she said and did.

There were perhaps twenty or thirty letters; the uppermost one she unfolded and read. Quickly from beginning to end she read it; then placed it again with the rest; then said as if to herself

Son cœur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne; and then looked irresolutely from side to side.

But little time did she so stand. "Pardon," she said, and stepped past the man next to her; and "Pardon" again, and stepped past me to the room corner where was a dully burning fire. As I moved to give her space, I began to understand what now she would do, and wondered and watched.

First she took the letter she had read and glanced at it again, and then with sudden movement thrust it among the coals. Then, one by one, she took the others and dropped them, so that one by one they touched the flame and were alight. Then, when the last yellow sheet had burned to blackness, with her foot she crushed it and the rest to powder; then smiled and turned towards the door.

There has been silence during the

time-it was but a minute or two that this was doing; and now as she stepped across the floor there was whispering only. But as she neared the door, men began to understand what she had done and they had seen; there had been sentiment, there had been poetry in the action; the spirit had been the spirit of love. A sudden noise of clappings filled the room; for a moment she paused as if startled; then smiled, and bowed, and went on into the street.

"This has been fine," said my friend, "very much finer than your versemaker and his sonnet. Even the professor was quiet and admiring. And the girl reads Béranger; the lines were perfect. What do you think of it all?" "What do I think of it all? Oh, I envy the Baron Dégremont," I said. EDGAR TURNER.

The late King Ludwig's castles of Hohen Schwangau and Neu Schwanstein attract constant streams of travellers, and have been frequently described in print, but his so-called Hunting Lodge, Linderhof, is less generally known. This freak in the wilderness is easily reached from' Garmisch, so we again climbed the steep road to Ettal and turned down the beautiful Graswangthal that had tempted our eyes when passing its mouth on the way to Oberammergau. It is a thickly wooded vale, guarded by pinnacled cliffs and stern crests, and its solitude only broken by onesmall hamlet throughout the five or six miles from Ettal. The forest grows

denser, the crags grow more imposing as we near the royal retreat.

Leaving our vehicle at the Forsthaus outside the Home Park, we walk through the woods to a wide torrent bed of dry white stones, and cross the bridge fronting the entrance. Grand avenues of beech and pine curve upwards from the gates, and climbing