handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if
such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once,
though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a
train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most
amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we
would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off down a pink-and-cream
colored avenue near by and admired so much the curtains of
red-and-yellow flowers--a cross between honeysuckles and trumpet
blossoms--overhanging a garden-wall that two friendly boys began to
share our interest in them. One of them mounted the other and tore down
handfuls of the flowers, which they bestowed upon us with so little
apparent expectation of reward that we promptly gave them of the
international copper coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the
station doubtless feeling guiltier than they. Had we not been accessory
after the fact to something like theft and, as it was Sunday, to
Sabbath-breaking besides? Afterward flowers proved so abundant in
Madeira in spite of its being winter, that we could not feel the larceny
a serious one, and the Sunday was a Latin Sabbath well used to being
broken. The pony engine which was to push our slanting car over the
cogged track up the mountain arrived with due ceremony of bell and
whistle, and we were let through the grille by the station-master as
politely as if we had been each his considered guest. Then the climb
began through the fields of sugar-cane, terraced vineyards, orchards of
fruit trees, and gardens of vegetables planted under the arbors over
which the grapes were trained. One of us told the others that the
vegetables were sheltered to save them from being scorched by the summer
sun, and that much of the work among them was done by moonlight to save
the laborers from the same fate. I do not know how he had amassed this
knowledge, and I am not sure that I have the right to impart it without