Country Life A. INTENSIVE ISLAND.
I have just come from an island, about the size of the Isle of 1Vight, where land, purely agricultural land, is sometimes considered to be worth £1,000 an acre or according to one standard guidebook, very much more. Most of this land was tilted at an angle so sharp that terracing was necessary, On one slope you may count exactly ninety-nine successive tiers of terraces, of which the highest is at some 2,000 feet above sea level. The whole island is nothing more, and nothing less than a congeries of volcanic dust-heaps, sloping at one favoured spot down to the sea in natural gradation, at others ending in cliffs reckoned among the highest in the world. One is over 1,900 feet. The heaps arc separated by deep and abrupt ravines it may be with a trickle of water among the stones of their bed. Such is Madeira ; and I give these elementary facts, not for the sake of encroaching on the guide- book, but " for edification " of a different sort.
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