Although the elements have wreaked all their fury on these shattered peaks, yet Nature has not been sparing in her gifts; the spaces between the rocks being filled up with close woods, while numerous evergreens, and other plants, serve to adorn the various chasms, rendering them valuable depositories of the vegetable kingdom. Few, indeed, are the evergreens of Europe which may not be found here; and when the mountain was visited by Mr. Swinburne, the apothecary of the convent had a list of four hundred and thirty-seven species of plants, and forty of trees, which shoot up spontaneously, and grace this hoary and venerable pile. There being two springs only on the mountain, there is a scarcity of water, which is chiefly collected in cisterns; an inconvenience, however, which is in a great measure counterbalanced by the absence of wolves, bears, and other wild beasts. Captain Carlton, an Englishman, who visited Montserrat some years ago, ascended to the loftiest hermitage, that of St. Jerome, by the means of spiral steps hewn out in the rock on account of the steep acclivity. This, he observes, could not, in his time, be well accomplished by a stranger, without following the footsteps of an old ass, who carried from the convent a daily supply of food to the hermits. This animal having his two panniers stored with the provisions divided into portions, climbed without a guide, and having stopped at each of the cells, where the hermit took the portion allotted to him, returned back to the convent. He found that one of these hermits, to beguile the wearisomeness of his solitude, had contrived so effectually to tame the birds which frequented the groves surrounding his hermitage, that he could draw them together with a whistle, when they perched on his head, breast, and shoulders, taking the food from his mouth.