Funchal Bay still amuse visitors. Daily observations for meteorology are here taken at 9 A.M. and 3 and 9 P.M.; the observatory standing eighty feet above sea-level. As our anchor rattles downwards, two excise boats with the national flag take up their stations to starboard and port; and the boatmen are carefully watched with telescopes from the shore. The wiser Spaniards have made Santa Cruz, Tenerife, a free port. The health-officer presently gives us _pratique_, and we welcome the good 'monopolist,' Mr. William Reid, and his son. The former, an Ayrshire man, has made himself proprietor of the four chief hostelries. Yates's or Hollway's in the _Entrada da Cidade_, or short avenue running north from the landing-place, has become a quasi-ruinous telegraph-station. Reid's has blossomed into the 'Royal Edinburgh;' it is rather a tavern than an hotel, admitting the 'casuals' from passing steamers and men who are not welcome elsewhere. One of these, who called himself a writer for the press, and who waxed insultingly drunk, made our hours bitter; but the owner has a satisfactory and sovereign way of dealing with such brutes. Miles's has become the Carmo, and Schlaff's the 'German.' The fourth, Santa Clara, retains her maiden name; the establishment is somewhat _collet monté_, but I know none in Europe more comfortable. There are many others of the second rank; and the Hôtel Central, with its café-billiard and estaminet at the city-entrance, is a good institution which might be made better. We throw a few coppers to the diving-boys, who are expert as the Somali savages of Aden, and we quit our water prison in the three-keeled boats, Magno telluris amore Egressi 'Tellus,' however, is represented at Funchal by chips and pebbles of black basalt like petrified kidneys, stuck on edge, often upon a base of bare rock. They are preferred to the slabs of Trieste and Northern Italy, which here, with the sole exception of the short Rua de Bettencourt, are confined to flights of steps. The surfaces are greased by rags and are polished by the passage of 'cars' or coach-sleighs, which irreverents call 'cow-carts;' these vehicles, evidently suggested by the _corsa_, or common sleigh, consist of a black-curtained carriage-body mounted on runners. The queer cobble-pavement, that resembles the mosaics of clams and palm-nuts further south, has sundry advantages. It is said to relieve the horses' back sinews; it is never dusty; the heaviest rain flows off it at once; nor is it bad walking when the kidney-stones are small. The black surface is sometimes diapered with white pebbles, lime from Porto Santo. Very strange is the glare of moonlight filtered through the foliage; the beams seem to fall upon patches of iced water.