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"NOTHING SO BAD AS WATER!”

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When I reached

could not feel the pencil when making notes. the hotel, I had a violent shivering fit. A dreadful headache, accompanied by feverishness, ensued, and by four o'clock my pulse was one hundred and fifty. For sixteen days my notebook remained without a single entry, and the monotonous experiences of an invalid succeeded the life of activity and interest which I had been enjoying for so many weeks.

A few days after the commencement of my illness-to which, by the way, no one would give a name; some called it bilious fever, others whispered typhoid-feeling able to raise my head off the pillow, I innocently asked the señora for some warm water and my brush and comb. I little knew the storm I was bringing down upon myself. "You must not wash; it will kill you; and it is very bad to do your hair." "But,” I said, "it is warm water I want. I am not going to use cold."

Hot or cold, there is nothing so bad as water." I explained that we always used it in England in our hospitals as well as in private houses for those who were ill. No, nothing would induce the señora to give me water. "Supposing one were in bed a month," I said, "do you mean to say one should not wash or use a brush?" to which the señora replied, "Certainly not!" I felt that further argument was useless, and gave in for the moment, merely saying, "If my hair were untouched for a month, I then might go to the barber and have it cut off!" An hour later, Maria the black chamber-maid came in, and I made John ask her for hot water, which she brought in all good faith, thinking it was for him. When, however, returning again a few minutes later, she found me at my toilet, her grief and consternation, though evidently genuine, were to me comic. I learned long after that she had gone to the señora and, with despair in voice and gesture, said, “The Señora Inglesa will die. She has washed!"

Don Gregorio, who throughout my illness proved a valuable friend and clever physician, had ordered a blister for my chest, and when the time came for it to be dressed, the barber was sent for. Doctors never do anything of a surgical nature; it is considered derogatory. So my barber came twice a day, and dressed the part blistered with a cabbage leaf and lard. He was very deft and gentle, but it seemed

extremely odd for a barber to do such work. There are two classes of barbers, one of them being styled surgeon-barbers, who are qualified to do many things of this sort. John paid two visits to a barber to have his hair cut, but the sights he saw were sufficient to deter him from again repeating the experiment.

The barbers in this town rank next in number to the shoemakers. Their shops are a little like those of old-fashioned barbers in England—a race fast becoming extinct, types of which are only now to be found in villages and out-of-the-way country towns. No gaudy red-and-yellow pole adorns the outside; no tempting array of hair-restorers, pomades, and cosmetiques attracts the eye, for there are no shop-windows. The greatest amount of ostentation is when the simple word "Barberia" is inscribed in big capitals above the door. For shaving, a basin of a half-moon shape is placed under the chin. The barbers mostly combine bleeding, blistering and toothdrawing with the more harmless occupations of shaving and hair-cutting. This combination of barbering and surgery is not agreeable. On John's first visit to a barber's here he saw a man's boil dressed, and on the second a wound in a man's head washed, and the hair generally picked over by the barber's fingers for 1-e. The machinery for brushing the hair with circular brushes very naturally has not yet penetrated to this out-of-the-world spot. Shampooing is unknown, its place being taken by a kind of dry wash after the hair is cut.

There is this peculiarity about the barbers' shops, the shoemakers' shops, the chemists', and even the ordinary stores in Las Palmas and the other towns of these islands: they all appear equal in merit or importance. There is no barber who enjoys a municipal reputation of being more proficient than his fellows, no shoemaker is said to cobble in a style superior to the general run, and they say you get as well and carefully drugged in one chemist's shop as in another.

The chemists in this island seem to be gregarious, all their shops being collected in a cluster within a stone's-throw of the casino. Why they should not spread themselves over the town, as would seem to be the more useful method, I cannot

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tell. They evidently like each other's society. One thing I know about them, that, as in England, their prices for the making up of the same prescription vary much. A prescription at one shop cost me three pesetas, at another two, and at another one and a half. So that in this respect they partake of the peculiarity common to the genus elsewhere. Their shops are the great gossiping places of the town, each providing a room where those who have nothing to do-and these seem to be in the majority-may meet and exchange ideas upon politics, the weather, the state of trade, or social scandal.

Besides avoiding surgical functions, a doctor in Gran Canaria will not, as a rule, set a bone. An English friend living here broke a small bone in her foot, and sent for her doctor to set it. He did so, but as she has been slightly lame ever since, her servants say to her, 'Ah ! if you had sent for the carpenter you would not be lame, as you are now. What does the doctor know about setting bones?' For, curiously enough, in this town the great bone-setter among the lower classes is a carpenter! There is now a resident English doctor, named Fernandez, in Las Palmas. The climate, however, does not allow his business or that of any doctor in the Fortunate Isles to grow beyond control. A Nottingham brewer, recently forced to quit England through ill-health, has found new life and energy in Gran Canaria, where, with a renovated constitution, he has started and is conducting a mineral-water company and an ice company, the latter of which turns out some fourteen hundredweight of ice per day.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE ISLETA-GUANCHE CEMETERY-SALT

WORKS.

What matters the sand or the whitening chalk,

The blighted herbage, the black'ning log,

The crooked beak of the eagle-hawk,

Or the hot, red tongue of the native dog?

That couch was rugged, those sextons rude,

Yet, in spite of a leaden shroud, we know
That the bravest and fairest are earthworms' food
When once they've gone where we all must go.

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.

THE Isleta, rudely breaking the rotundity of Gran Canaria and jutting abruptly into the sea, is joined to the island by a most slender, unsubstantial-looking neck. Till quite recently there was no fresh water on the Isleta, every drop for drinking and washing having to be brought from the mainland. The labour of this was enormous, and it is astonishing, nay, almost incredible, that a pipe conveying fresh water had not been laid down years ago. But the fact remains that women and children had daily to trudge along the dusty road of the Isleta with earthenware pots on their heads, and return by the same weary way heavily laden. The waste of time, the fatigue, and the premium put upon dirtiness, and therefore disease, by this terribly tedious method of obtaining the first necessary of life, are fearful to contemplate. Before lighting her streets with incandescent lights, before indulging in a Harbour of Refuge, a grand opera house, and a European cable, one would have thought the well-built and grandly edificed town of Las Palmas would have provided her suburb with the first essential of healthy living.

A step, as it were, takes us from the end of the street on to the wild bare country, and the ground is as savage and

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chaotic as ground can well be. There is no soil, the surface being one mass of broken-up lava pieces, light, spongy stones of all sizes, and entirely covered with rough, jagged excrescences, which cut the boots and tear in the rudest manner any clothing drawn against them. Walking is very difficult and tiring. It consists in a tedious picking of the way, balancing the body on the top of a shaky piece one moment and then springing on to another, at all hazards avoiding putting the foot between the blocks. The ground is full of small caves-bubbles in the lava, where part of the roof has fallen in-of from one to several feet in size.

Vegetation, in the sense of a clothing, the land has none. In the hollow, the little valleys where moisture can linger longer, the lava stones are partially covered with lichen, and here and there are individuals of the square-stemmed, columnar euphorbia (E. Canariensis), the dragon tree euphorbia (Kleinia meriifolia), and the graceful, feathery Plocama pendula. The roots of these shrubs must go down a long way below the lava stones in order to find soil. At a few places in some of the little valleys, and nearer to the bases of the peaks, little forests of these singular plants are found. Though peculiar at first sight, when one becomes accustomed to their odd shapes these shrubs are not destitute of beauty. The light, weeping, graceful form of the feathery Plocama, with its lively green colour, contrasts not unpleasingly with the gouty, branching stem of the Kleinia, resembling a miniature dragon tree, surmounted with its grey-green foliage; these two plants again serve to set off the stiff square vegetable columns of the monstrous-looking Euphorbia. Certainly when seen together they blend harmoniously with the chaotic disorder of the blocks of lava, and mingle their soft shades of green with the browns of the ground.

If a piece of jagged stone be thrown into a clump of the Euphorbia Canariensis, the thick, milky, almost creamy, fluid runs or squirts out. The plant seems charged with this poisonous fluid, and ready to pour it out at the slightest abrasion. When dried, this sap forms the drug euphorbium of the pharmacopoeia. A thick, poisonous, milky juice also exudes from the kleinia. These plants are the most charac

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