This does not sound very interesting. Mahon is not, however, wholly devoid of the picturesque element. The old gate of Barbarossa is named after that famous pirate, by whom the city was surprised and sacked in 1536, and the fortifications still bear traces of the siege of 1781. Ciudadela, the old capital, at the opposite end of the island, is more suggestive of old times and memories. The streets are quaint and arcaded, and lined with fine old mansions: and there is an old palace, and a vast dim cathedral, which no one has ever properly explored. Ten minutes will be enough in which to exhaust the sights of Ciudadela, and you may then go and look at the Buffador, a blow-hole like those to be seen at Sark. The people of Menorca have long since abandoned their native dress--presuming that they ever had one; but M. Vuillier remarked the continuance of the old custom, observable in other countries, of strewing the path of a bridal party with obstacles and building a wall before the house of the bride and bridegroom, the morning after their marriage. We see one of the innumerable survivals here of marriage by capture. The people are strangely fond of the practice of vaccination, and will perform it on each other with the least possible excuse. In blood-letting they also entertain an ineradicable belief. Speaking of Alazor, a large village, Ford says: “It is worth the traveller’s while to go into any of the peasants’ houses and convince himself that in no other part of the world do the lower (_i.e._, working) classes live in greater comfort and even luxury. A man who has only a franc and a half a day as wages, and a little bit of garden, has a large and commodious house, well furnished, exquisitely clean, and always with a spare bed for the stranger. The character of the people is in exact harmony with their surroundings. They are polite and hospitable, crime is unknown, and their hygienic condition being so favourable they are healthy and long-lived. If is difficult to write of them without exaggeration and using too many terms of admiration for the good and wholesome life they lead.”