To visit the Caldera de Bandana, three miles from the city, we hired a carriage with the normal row of three lean rats, which managed, however, to canter or gallop the greater part of the way. The boy-driver, Agustin, was a fair specimen of his race, obstinate as a Berber or a mule. As it was Sunday he wanted to halt at every _venta_ (pub), _curioseando_--that is, admiring the opposite sex. Some of the younger girls are undoubtedly pretty, yet they show unmistakable signs of Guanche blood. The toilette is not becoming: here the shawl takes the place of the mantilla, and the head-covering, as in Tenerife, is capped by the hideous billycock. To all my remonstrances Don Agustin curtly replied with the usual island formula, 'Am I a slave?' This class has a surly, grumbling way, utterly wanting the dignity of the lower-order Spaniard and the Moor; and it is to be managed only by threatening to withhold the _propinas_ (tip). But the jarvey, like the bath-man, the barber, and generally the body-servant and the menial classes which wait upon man's person, are not always models of civility. We again passed the hospital and ascended the new zigzag to the right of the Giniguada. The torrent-bed, now bright green with arum and pepper, grows vegetables, maize, and cactus. Its banks bear large plantations of the dates from which Las Palmas borrows her pretty Eastern names. In most places they are mere brabs, and, like the olive, they fail to fruit. The larger growths are barbarously docked, as in Catholic countries generally; and the fronds are reduced to mere brooms and rats'-tails. The people are not fond of palms; the shade and the roots, they say, injure their crops, and the tree is barely worth one dollar per annum. At the top of the Cuesta de San Roque, which reminded me of its namesake near Gibraltar, I found a barren ridge growing only euphorbia. The Barranco Seco, on the top, showed in the sole a conspicuously big house which has no other view but the sides of a barren trough. This was the 'folly' of an eccentric nobleman, who preferred the absence to the company of his friends. Half an hour's cold, bleak drive placed us at the Tafira village. Here the land yields four crops a year, two of maize and two of potatoes. Formerly worth $100 per acre, the annual value had been raised by cochineal to $500. All, however, depends upon water, which is enormously dear. The yelping curs have mostly bushy tails, like those which support the arms of the Canary Islands. The grey and green finches represent our 'domestic warbler' (_Fringilla canaria_), which reached England about 1500, when a ship with a few birds on board had been wrecked off Elba.