backs of their heads, and brown or yellow shawls. They have, combined with a charming simplicity, all the subtle graces which women can acquire under an amorous sky. In Ibiza passions are hot, and women -since they are greatly in the minority-at a premium. When an Ibizan farmer's daughter reaches a marriageable age, an announcement is sent out to the district, and on an appointed evening the ceremony of courtship takes place. The boys who turn up are each allowed ten minutes or a quarter of an hour in which to do their best to win the maiden's heart. Woe betide the boy who outstays his allotted time by so much as thirty seconds! The Ibizans are hot-blooded, revolvers are plentiful, and the police find it wiser not to investigate crimes passionels, After the last of the suitors has paid his last compliment, the girl makes her choice, the engagement is announced, and is no doubt celebrated by a great deal of eating and drinking and dancing.

It is a good island for women. I don't suppose they have votes, but-if the household of Señor Torres Tur, our host at the Fonda del Commercio, is anything to go by-they certainly have power. I used to find my walks abroad with Teresita quite embarrassing. On one Sunday afternoon, within two kilometres of the city, she was handed no less than ten bouquets of wild flowers by ten smiling youths. Alas! I had to carry them home for

her through the broiling sunshine.

Ibiza is a town which looks very much larger than it really is, so effectively is it situated. It is divided into two halves. The lower town-La Marinagrew up outside the massive fortifications when the island lost its riches, and the Corsairs ceased to be a menace. In the upper town, La Ciudad, are the houses of the wealthier inhabitants-some quite seigneurial in their magnificence,-the Cathedral, the Bishop's palace, the Barracks, and a small but extremely interesting museum, containing relics of the many civilisations-Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Moorish which have at different epochs established themselves upon the island. Just outside the walls of the city, on the hill-top, is the Phoenician necropolis of Ereso, which contains over two thousand tombs, which those who are sufficiently interested can enter. I was told that if I took a spade and dug, I should be almost certain to find something of interestbroken pottery, a statuette, perhaps coins. But I am no digger, particularly under a broiling sun, and I preferred, in the coolness of the museum, to admire the results of other people's toil. The cathedral, which has a grey and weatherbeaten appearance, is not really older than the seventeenth century. It stands on a site successively occupied by a Phonician temple of Baal, a Greek temple of Minerva, and a Moorish mosque. Inside, it is clean

and cool, and decorated in a queer Baroque style, no doubt by island craftsmen, with naïve statues and pictures of the saints and painted altars mellowed by time into the most enchanting colour combinations. If La Ciudad evokes memories of the days when Ibiza was prosperous, when the export of its purple dyes, its terra-cotta figures, its salt and ore, attracted to it the embarrassing attentions of the pirates of the Mediterranean, there is at present, from the tourist's standpoint, not a great deal to be seen there. The principal charm of the upper town is the view. From the ramparts by the cathedral you can look down upon the harbour, with its pictures que shipping, and across the bay to the lighthouse, and the little hills beyond it, all bathed in sunlight. Then walking on under an archway, you find when you emerge an entirely fresh coup-d'œil in the opposite direction. Below you lies another enchanting stretch of coast-line. In the middle distance is an old stone tower standing on a small headland, and far away, on the horizon, is the dark outline of the cliffs of the island of Formentera. The stretch of sea here, as all round Ibiza, is studded with great solitary rocks and tiny

The people of Ibiza are the very soul of kindness to the forastero. As a good host will treat an honoured guest, so

islands, about which the water breaks in a glittering froth of foam. The view was so exquisite, with the sunshine sparkling on the yellow sands and the sapphire waters of the Mediterranean, that when Teresita and I first came upon it we found a comfortable place under a gnarled and twisted olive-tree, and stayed there, so full of sheer happiness that we did not want to speak. It was just too good to be true: the island of our dreams. After an hour or so, as I suffer, in sunshiny countries, from an inability to keep my clothes on, I made my way with difficulty down the hillside to the shore, and, finding a convenient cave, discarded the offending garments and slipped into the sea.

The rocks were sharp, and cut my feet, and there were tiresome drifts of seaweed, but I did not care. I lay on my back, cradled in the clear sparkling water, and looked up at the sky, and could have found no unhappy thing to think about had I tried never so desperately. The trials and afflictions of this mortal life were simply washed out of my memory, and my heart sang inside me in sheer thankfulness for a rapture of the senses which I had never expected to experience again.

they welcome the strangers who come among them. Their unaffected courtesy and friendliness, and their unwillingness

to exploit the traveller financially on occasions they even make it difficult for him to pay the modest sum he owes,— do much to convince one that the modern commercialised civilisation is really as black as philosophers and poets love to paint it. On one occasion, when we had completely lost our way, we came by chance upon a farmhouse. A group of labourers and a middle-aged man, rather better dressed than the peasants, were leaning over the mud wall in front of the house, laughing and talking together in the cool of the evening. Taking my courage in both hands, I went up to them and asked them in French whether they could tell me the way. Luckily, the superior individual, who turned out to be the owner of the farm, understood French, and could himself speak it a little. He at once came out to us and insisted upon guiding us through his beautifully cultivated farm and putting us upon our road. All the time he carried on a stream of conversation, sometimes in Castilian for Teresita, sometimes in French for me. Following the island custom, he asked us our Christian names, and called us by them in the most gracious manner conceivable. Nor did he part with us when we emerged from his domain on to the footpath. We must visit a friend of his, he insisted, who had a wonderful aquarium full of langostas. He simply would not be denied. We came to the langostaVOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCCIV.

name? What age have you? What does your father? What number peoples has city of Lon-don? Luckily, though he could pose these pulverising questions, his English did not enable him to understand our replies. After we had compli mented Don Jaime on his son's proficiency in English, we were invited to go down on our knees and peer into a hole. Far below us the innocent langostas, at present in ignorance of their ultimate fate, were moving about in considerable numbers. After this we were shown a strange HeathRobinson device of little canals, traps, pumps, and pulleys by which first the langostas were lured into their prison, and secondly, the water in it was kept continually in motion while they were there. It was a most baffling and complicated arrangement, and Teresita was so taken aback by it that it was four minutes before she could scrape together enough Castilian to tell our host how clever she thought it. She did so at last, however, and Don

21

Jaime's face broke up into one vast beam. The langosta-trap was the pride and joy of his life.

Night had fallen, and the stars had already lit their glittering lamps in the velvet black infinity above us, when we at last set off home, four abreast, down the dusty carretara. Neither Don Jaime, nor his friend Juan, would leave us until they had seen us safely to our fonda, and all the way they gave us lessons in Ibicenca, pointing to the stars, the olivetrees, and the simple objects that we passed en route, and telling us their names in the island patois.

After some days of exploring Ibiza, during which we went into all the churches, visited the cool and shady meat-market which has a fountain in the centre and is bright with scarlet geraniums, and the general market, which is a replica of the Parthenon, and the Alameda, with its rival cinemas and its comic statue of a Cuban patriot leaning forward with out stretched sword over the naked form of a young lady who offers him a laurel wreath; after we had tipped the three official beggars of the city-including the ancient lady who stands outside the great stone gateway flanked by headless Roman statues which leads into La Ciudad, and stretches out in silence a withered and compelling arm; after we had done all these things, and in the intervals many times revisited our favourite café, Teresita decided that we ought to

go for a tour round the island, and visit the official sights. All I could think of as a means of enlightenment as to what constituted the official sights was that we should make a call at the British Vice-Consulate. We found the place at last

it was a grain-merchant's office on the quay. The top storey of a house lower down was for some reason decorated with the Royal Arms of our country, but a young gentleman, guessing our errand, had caught us at the door and redirected us. We walked into the office, but there was no grain - merchant-only a few rickety chairs, a large scale map of Ibiza, regulations for marriages, and innumerable flies. We waited a long time, wondering why the business of Great Britain was thus neglected, when at last a very warm perspiring gentleman arrived and greeted us in Spanish. He led us into an inner room, and we sat down. He appeared to be overcome with agitation, and I gathered that the cause of it was that we were the only members of the British Empire on whom he had ever in his life set eyes. We asked him about the sights of Ibiza, and his agitation only increased. He uttered at last strange sounds from a toothless and roofless mouth, which appeared to mean, "No English." He couldn't speak a word. was really most embarrassing for everybody. And how the good man wanted to be really useful! It was, I guessed, his supreme emotional moment,

It

Since the consul couldn't help us, we decided to get into a diligence and see what happened. No one could tell us where or when the diligence started. Apparently it went when it felt inclined. Luckily, quite by chance, we found one on the point of departure, and were soon bumping down the highway towards the tiny port of San Antonio.

For eight miles or so the road passed between low red hills covered with pines, with well-cultivated fields upon their slopes, and white houses with flat roofs dotted here and there about them; and then suddenly the long narrow inlet, a streak of sapphire amidst the surrounding red and green, became visible, and a few minutes later the car entered the village, and drew up, panting, before the fonda La Esmeralda. It does not take long to explore San Antonio. By the waterside is a little square, planted with acacia-trees, which forms the focus of the village life. In the centre is a fortified church, whitewashed and dazzling in the sunlight. There are perhaps two hundred little houses in the village, arranged in clean but narrow streets cut

ting one another at right angles. Beyond the confines of the village is a bare and stony stretch of land, which separates it from the sea-shore. Below is the long narrow harbour. Half-way between the village and the sea a stone jetty stretches out an arm into the harbour to protect the group of faluchas which lie at anchor. The whole scene is enchanting, and in the heat of the afternoon we could not bring ourselves to leave it to go in search of the cave church of Santa Ines, or to look for Moorish pottery, which, it is said, can be picked up by the armful in its neighbourhood. Instead, we walked along by the creek to the cliff's edge, and sat looking across the island-studded Mediterranean, watching the sun sparkling on the white foam and on the dancing waves. When we returned to the fonda, our innkeeper, his wife, his mother, and his handsome son and daughters showed us their best bedroom, and very clean and comfortable it looked. They also

gave us an excellent luncheon, though the wine they offered us to wash it down with was dark and acid, and could not be made drinkable even with a large admixture of water.

Santa Eulalia, on the eastern side of the island, is a slightly larger village than San Antonio, and is generally considered the more beautiful of the two. It has an interesting, well-situated, fortified church and priest's house, a real brook full of water all the year round, an