SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

A Winter in the Azores; and a Summer at the Baths of the Pumas. By Joseph Buller, M.D., and Henry Dollar, of Lincoln's Inn. In two volumes.. Van Voortt. Fic-nox,

The Little Wife; and the Baronet's Daughters. By Mrs. Grey. Author of " The

Young Prima Donna," and " The Duke." In three cols vounders and Meg. Portim, England's Trust, and other Poems. By Lord John Manners Ritington.

A WINTER IN THE AZORES, BY THE BROTHERS RU LLA R.

IF a vessel sailed in a direct line from Lisbon to Philadelphia, she would about touch the Azores or Western Isles, which lie nearly mid- way between Europe and America. The groupe consists of nine islands : "St. Michael and St. Mary, closely adjoining each other ; Terceira, Fayal, Pico, Graciosa, St. George, nearly a groupe by them- selves ; and Corvo and Flores, considerably to the Westward," that is more towards America. They have a volcanic origin, though no volcano is now at work ; and possess the characteristics of such islands—floods of lava, extinct craters, precipitous mountains, fre- quently forming one central peak, a friable soil, and a dangerous coast. They are a possession of Portugal, but the population has a mixture of Spanish blood, which has improved the breed ; and the islands lie so out of the way of the world, that the inhabitants, especially of the less frequented isles, retain all the ignorance, simplicity, bonhounnie, and other traits not quite so respectable, which distinguish the colonists and country-people of Southern Europe. Their occupation by Don PEDRO, some years since, ren- dered the name of Terceira frequent in the English newspapers and familiar in the mouths of men who knew nothing of its locality ; and we drive a regular and considerable trade with it for oranges, and a less important one for wine. That the world at large is so ignorant of the whereabouts and the all-about of the Azores as our authors assert, and enforce by some lively instances, we do not believe ; but we will admit., that of the vast number of persons who eat St. Michael's oranges, or what they buy as such, very few know that the fruit is named from the largest and most important of the Western Isles.

Situated in about the same latitude as the extreme South of Europe, the climate is warm throughout the winter; and as it is constantly tempered by sea-breezes, blowing over many thousand miles of ocean, the resident, by paying some regard to situation, may in summer escape the excessive heats of the Continental South. The all-tempering sea-winds render the climate very equable, varying less than that of any other place. Observations made by Dr. MILLAR during his stay at St. Michael, furnish some inte- resting facts upon this point, both positive and comparative.

"The mean in-door temperature of a room in Villa Franca without fire, curtains, or carpet, during the winter months, is 60 deg. with a mean range of 3 deg. ; and the out-of-door temperature during the flay for the same period presents a mean of 60 deg. with a range of 7 deg. The mean difference between the climate in doors and out of doors is so trifling as scarcely to de- serve notice ; being no more than a small decimal fraction of a degree. There is, however, a difference of 4 deg. between the range of the thermometer in the

house and out of doors. • • * "Comparing the climate of Villa Franca during the winter months with that of the South of England in the summer time, it appears from Mr. Giddy's Meteorological Journal, that the average mean temperature of the Land's End in the month cf August during a period of twelve years was precisely the same as that of the town of Villa Franca in St. Michael's, during the months of December, January, February, March, and April; over which the foregoing observations extend, namely 60 deg. 9 min.

"The mean temperature of the winter months in St. Michael's, according to these observations, is 2 deg. colder than Madeira, 5 deg. warmer than Lisbon, 13 deg. warmer than Nice, 12 deg. warmer than Rome, and 12 deg. warmer than Naples."

It was to these islands that Dr. BULLAR and his brother, a stu- dent of Lincoln's Inn, proceeded in the autumn of 1838; the one an invalid in search of health, the other as his companion. They made the passage in a fruit-vessel, encountering a tremendous gale: they passed the winter at St. Michael's, the spring in excur- sions to the adjacent islands of Fayal, Pico, St. George's, Flores, and Corvo, and the summer at the baths of the Furnas ; for the islands have vaious hot mineral waters, and the Furnas is the Carlsbad or Baden-Baden of the Azores, lying in the crater of an extinct volcano.

Of the incidents and impressions of their excursion, the brothers seem to have kept a journal; and the volumes before us consist of extracts from their manuscripts, Dithout regard to occasional in- completeness, "in the hope that notes made on the spot might have a greater truth about them than more finished recollections composed at home." And this character of truth is not only at- tained, but with a high degree of spirit, liveliness, and pictorial effect. The character of every thing, both animate and inanimate, which came before them, is vividly conveyed to the reader : the ludicrous disagreeables of a sea-voyage ; the sublimity of ocean in a storm, or its beauty in a calm ; the various "odd fellows" found among British and Portuguese mariners or travellers in passage-ships ; the peculiarities of Azorean manners and costumes ; the volcanic wild- ness of some of the landscapes of the Western Isles, the picturesque loveliness of others, with the mixed glories of temperate and tro- pical vegetation, and the deliciousness of the balmy climate ; all these are brought out, by minds that combine the imagination of a poetical faculty with the definite perception of form that belongs to the eye of an artist and the discrimination imparted by professional train- ing. Speaking of the work as a whole, however, the description of externals somewhat predominates ; so that, though any part consi- dered singly must be pronounced excellent, the entire effect is

somewhat unexciting—not from the want of human interest, for there is a good deal of personal character and manners in the book, but because there is too oft-repeated a description of things not.es- sentially different. The general charaftcr of the writers also inclines towards the superficial : their minds are more accomplished than profound ; and their style of description is rather painting in words by enumerating visible points, than a presentation of the essential qualities of objects. Altogether, however, A Winter in the Azores is a very delightful book of travels ; new in its subject, attractive and informing in its matter, and agreeable in its style.

The outward voyage contains some sketches, powerful or ludi- crous according to the nature of the subject, and furnishing both amusement and evidence of the writer's literary ability ; but as they are common to sea-voyages, we will pass them over in order to exhibit characteristics more peculiar to the Azores.

ST. MICHAEL'S ORANGES AND ST. MICHAEL'S DECEMBER.

We find by letters from England, that oranges ticketed as from St. Michael's are already in shop windows. Not an orange has yet left this island. Walked three miles into the country, through the eternal lanes of stone walls, and at last came to one of the conical hills that abound in the neigh- bourhood of Ponta Delgada. Here we sat ; and though Christmas is approach- ing and the wind blows from the N.E. the weather was mild enough to make it pleasant to sit with one's hat off. This, perhaps, is a plainer way of stating the warmth than to say that the thermometer is 65 deg. in the shade. Children, too, ran about by the cottage-doors in mere cotton shirts.

AZOREAN POLITENESS.

The politeness of the people here is very striking to an Englishman. A. countryman will hardly ever pass you without taking off his hat, even when his load may make it a real inconvenience to him ; and as there is a serious composure about their courtesy, and an apparent absence of servility, these re- cognitions seem like tokens of sincere good-will. I do not know that there is more downright civility of purpose about them than there is in John Bull— very possibly there may be much less. There is certainly more varnish ; and a good watch looks better in a gold case though it may go as well in one of Britannia metal.

A stranger is likely to be set down as most unmannered until be knows that every man is expected to take off his hat to every lady whose eye he catches, whether in her balcony, or in her carriage, or in the street. This outward mark of politeness is almost universal.

The country-people do this with a deliberate gravity, very different to the graceless but equally civil mode in which country-people in English villages. remote from the defilement of large towns, pinch the brims of their hats to those better dressed than themselves.

The custom is agreeable enough to strangers, as it deprives a strange place of its solitariness. The mutual recognition awakens slight sympathies on each side, and on this account should not be despised, though it is worth no more.

A FAMILY GROUSE: CIIRIST3IAS DAY.

In the evening we wandered out, and paid Thomazia's cottage a visit. She and her children and grandchildren were sitting up in all the enjoyment of their festival. In one corner of the room was the bed, which in every cottage and on all occasions, is perfectly clean and neat, but today it was decorated. with a finely-worked muslin valiance, and a handsome coverlid of white quilted materials, on which were strewed a few flowers. The floor was spread with fresh rushes, the walls and ceiling were covered with green branches of the Faye; and in the midst of this bower, just sufficiently lighted by a small cru- cifix-lamp to make a picture of the cottage interior, lay and lounged the family of the Bichos. There was Antonio stretched on the rushes in his hairy strength, sound asleep. Thomazia squatted in 1k1oorish fashion with her elbows on her knees ; one of her children with his head upon her lap, lay in motionless sleep, a girl in a bright red petticoat, laughing to her baby and quizzing the foreigners to her black-eyed sister who sat beside her, leaned upon the bed ; her husband, with short mustachios and olive brown complexion, rubbed his cat, and smiled at the notice taken of the cottage; and the youngest and brownest grandchild stood on the clothes-chest in a small white shirt, wondering at us with child-like simplicity. All were merry, and all were more or less cheered with wine. They were well-pleased to be looked at and praised. All the atti- tudes were perfect, being the natural expressions of unfettered and healthy bo- dies. The single bright lamp in the dark leafy room ; the strong contrasts of light and shade • the thin angular limbs, and more marked features of the older woman, compared with the rounded and feminine figure of her daughter, and the young children on the floor—altogether produced a most picturesque effect. In the daytime, when talking to their neighbours or playing in the street, they all looked exquisitely happy - and even the little child, who, in addition to its single white shirt, had been decked out with an orange-coloured jacket, seemed delightfully conscious that it was more smartly dressed than usuaL

PACKING ORANGES.

December 27.—Walked this morning to an orange-garden beyond the little village of Ribeira Secca. At its entrance was a pathway with evergreen faya- trees on each side, meeting in arches overhead. Suddenly we came upon merry groups of men and boys, all busily engaged in packing oranges in a square and open plot of ground. They were gathered round a goodly pile of the fresh fruit, sitting on heaps of the dry calyx-leaves of the Indian corn, in

which each orange is wrapped before it is placed in the boxes. • • A quantity of the leaves being heaped together near the packers, the °peril- tion began. A child handed to a workman who squatted by the heap of fruit a prepared husk ; this was rapidly snatched from the child, wrapped round the orange by an intermediate workman, passed by the feeder to the next, who, sitting with the chest between his legs, placed it in the orange-box with amazing rapidity, took a second and a third and a fourth as fast as his hands could move and the feeders could supply him, until at length the chest was filled to overflowing, and was ready to be nailed up. Two men then handed it to the carpenter, who bent over the orange-chest several thin boards, secured them with a willow band, pressed it with his naked foot as he sawed off the ragged ends of the boards, and finally despatched it to the ass, which stood ready for lading. • • • *

The pressure of these flexible boards is immediately upon the oranges ; a plan admirably adapted to spoil them, for they are thus flattened and squeezed. Of course, there are cogent reasons for this. One is, that the duty to be paid in England is calculated according to the size of the box, and consequently the more oranges that can be squeezed in, the less duty is paid. Another reason is, that the wholesale dealers in London, Liverpool, &c. prefer the present mode of packing, which enables them to take out a couple of hundred oranges, and then to send the boxes to their country customers as full ones, which they perhaps may be, since the squeezed oranges, when the pressure is removed, swell out to their original size. Of this I was informed by a proprietor of orange-gardens, who had tried the plan of sending his oranges in square boxes less tightly packed, but did not find that his customers were pleased by it.

GRINDING OPERATION OF THE SEA.

It is curious to observe how every part of the soil of this island, from the boldest mountain to the smallest grain of sand on the shore, illustrates its vol- canic origin. The pebbles in our walk today were either rounded fragments of light pumice, marking the edges of the broad waves that had thrown them on the beach, or were black, red, or variegated, compact or spongy, as they chanced to be of smite or of a more solid basaltic lava. By standing close to the water's edge, we could see and hear in active operation the grinding process by which irregular lumps of stone speedily become smooth pebbles, and afterwards fine sand. A. long heavy sea would fall over and thunder on the beach like a broad green cascade, swamping the whole mass of stones and rock, and carrying them back as it receded with a sharp wet rattle. Another and another wave immediately followed with the same thundering fall and the same rattling re • coil, keeping the whole shore for many hundred yards in a perpetual grinding motion. This is going on in a greater or less degree all round the island, and for centuries has done the same.

LITERATURE IN THE AZORES.

March I.—There is not a single book-shop in St. Michael's; and we are told that not one is to be found in either of the islands. Those who buy books, send to England, or America, or Lisbon for them. The British and Foreign Bible Society in England sent some Portuguese Bibles here some years ago; but it is said that they remained in the customhouse until they were decayed, (which, as the customhouse is near the sea, and things easily spoil by damp, might speedily be the case,) and that they were afterwards removed it is not known where. Certainly, with the exception of my own Testament, which I lost very unaccountably soon after landing, I have not seen a single Portuguese version of the Bible since I have been here. In a cottage into which we went the other day, were a beautifully-printed French copy of_Virgil, an odd volume of the Odes of Horace with a French prose translation, three grammars of the French, Latin, and Portuguese languages ; one or two theological works in Portugnese, with as many short stories of no apparent religious or political tendency, and a French translation of ./Eschylus. They belonged to some painstaking youth, who might probably have been reading for the church ; and who, with this tendency upon him, begged of us, through his servant, a pair of gloves of" a sad colour," to wear in the Good Friday procession.

PECULIARITY IN ORANGE-TREES.

March 26.—Accompanied Senhor B— to several of his orange-gardens in the town. Many of the trees in one garden were a hundred years old, still bearing plentifully a highly-prized thin-skinned orange, full of juice, and free from pips. The thinness of the rind of a St. Michael's orange and its freedom from pips, depend on the age of the tree. The young trees, when in full vigour, bear fruit with a thick pulpy rind and an abundance of seeds ; but as the vigour of the plant declines, the peel becomes thinner, and the seeds gra- dually diminish in number until they disappear altogether. Thus the oranges that we esteem the most are the produce of barren trees, and those which we consider the least palatable come from plants in full vigour.

WORKINGS Or TIIE SLAVE-TRADE.

On expressing surprise that this miserable craft [a vessel called by its owner the Flower of Fayal, but popularly known as "the skull of a jackass"] should be employed in a traffic in which there is so much risk of being captured by English cruisers that the fastest vessels are usually engaged in it, I was told that the wretched appearance of the vessel was all in her favour : the British officers would be less likely to suspect her to be a slaver, and would therefore let her pass unexamined. The slave-dealers evade us in another way. The profit on slaves is so great that it will amply pay the expenses of a small vessel to carry fifteen or twenty Negroes across the Atlantic; and it is not unusual for the captain of small slave-ships to procure passports for a few Negroes from the authorities of the Cape de Verde Islands, and to carry them as passengers to Brazil, where he sells them for slaves.

A SEA-PIECE.

Few sea pleasures can exceed those we have enjoyed in our excursions between these islands during this spring and early summer weather. Voyages of two or three days at a time, with light winds or gentle breezes, a quiet sea, so tmild a temperature as to admit of spending the whole day in the open air ; no cabin imprisonment, bright starry or moonlight lights, islands of great external beauty, Haing abruptly out of the water to the height of several thou- sand feet, and clothed with green to their topmost acclivities; what spot on the earth with such circumstances of enjoyment could be found in so large a mea- sure, and with so few drawbacks?

The full-moon rose at night like a vast red-lint globe issuing out of the ocean; but soon looked smaller, and showered down her silvery light. In this climate the moon seems actually suspended, not merely inlaid in the heavens : the eye reaches far into the infinite space beyond; and the shadows she casts are sharp and black, like silhouettes.

TAM-FIELDS: A PICTURE.

I like looking at these Tam-fields: the plants have the bold vigorous life of tropical vegetation ; their large, single, sharply cut leaves are each either wholly or partially distinct, so that their form is clearly seen, although thou- sands grow together. The rich bluish bloom on their upper surface, and the yellower green of the lower, vary the colouring according as the leaves are turned towards you or from you ; and their large but light and graceful foot- stalks, slightly curved by the weight of the ample leaf, spring directly out of the bright orange soil ; the grounds in which they grow most luxuriantly being overflowed by the warm chalybeate springs and coated with iron. Two brilliant colours, green and orange, are thus in contrast and yet in harmony ; such tints as you see in some of Guido's pictures, in which he manages to introduce the most brilliant draperies and backgrounds of various bright dyes, without pro- ducing the impression either of gaudiness or finery. Then, to be sure, his female figures, so clothed, are like these plants ; tall, graceful, and luxuriant. Fine women and fine vegetables can carry off bright and strongly-contrasted colours, which would annihilate or overwhelm more minute and delicate ladies or flowers.

A good part of the book, towards the close of the second volume, is devoted to a consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of the climate as a resort for invalids; together with a variety of practical information, useful as a guide to the advisers of the patient, and equally useful to the patient himself when it is settled he is to visit the Azores. Of the climate we have already spoken ; and except a tendency to moisture which prevails, but more in some islands than in others, it seems one of the mildest and most equable to be found,—excelling Madeira in these respects, though not in others. During the orange-season, the communication between England and St. Michael's is frequent and regular ; and as the fruit-vessels are built expressly for speed, and we believe "carry on" as long as they dare, passages are made quickly ; one vessel having run the distance in seven days, which is nearly as rapid as the Atlantic steamers. To delicate invalids with delicate notions, and no other idea of life than what they have derived from their own drawing-rooms, these vessels would scarcely furnish a fit passage, especially as from their reckless mode of sailing the sea pretty constantly washes over all "forwards." This want of

English comforts and accommodation is the great drawback to the islands themselves ; and the approach to them, to be found in one or two ports, is found at places not perhaps the best for invalids to reside at. Putting these difficulties aside, which are in the mind of the individual rather than in the nature of things, the Azores are probably about the best place on the face of the globe for the delicate to acquire that tone and strengthening which are given by living, as it were, in the open air—a mode of life our climate does not permit, even in the summer, for any continuance. Besides the advantage of the climate, the Western Isles appear to be a very cheap place for persons who are content with native productions ; and they have in themselves a variety of baths and mineral waters, as delightful, it would seem, as any Dlr. GRANVILLE experienced in his Continental tour. Here, as an example, is

THE SULPHUR-BATHS AT YURNAS.

Never has it been my good fortune to bathe in so luxurious a bath as the unmixed sulphur-water. If any thing could possibly be found to reconcile one to earthquakes, it is assuredly to be found in the baths of the Furnas. Here they are, whenever you may choose to enjoy them, by night and by day, in cold and in heat, summer and winter, always the same, welling from their source in never-failing abundance ; open at all hours, free to all, and free of cost. But let it not be supposed that we are in a Bath pump-room, with its marble luxuries. Nothing can be less inviting than the appearance of these bathing-houses, which, for the most part, have a subterraneous aspect; but except to the fastidious, they are all-sufficient for the one purpose for which they have been built—that of amply enjoying the waters. And let a rheumatic and sour-tempered Englishman, exercising his national privilege of grumbling to its fullest extent, and whose every word and work, complexion, gait, and temper—whose very clothes, hanging on the pegs in the bath-room, indicate bile—after despising the appearance of these rooms, slowly, quietly, otter-like, subside into a sulphur-bath tempered by old John Quiet to the moderate warmth of 95 deg. ; and then let him confess whether he be not at once a wiser and a better man ; whether his discontent has not lessened, his lust for purple and fine linen vanished, and his care for marble and pump-rooms faded away.

My bath today was unexceptionable. The word sulphur-bath is an unat- tractive word, reminding you of brimstone and matches and offensive fumes; but the truth is, that had it not been ascertained from analysis that there is sulphur in the composition of the water, you could scarcely believe that any could be found. It is soft and soapy to the touch, delicately smooth, and slightly oleaginous on the skin, free from smell, of an opaline look, is refreshing and detersive, and probably quite as pleasurable to the bodily feelings as were those translucent baths of milk which, after affording ease and relaxation to the limbs and body of a late noble duke, are said to have afterwards appeared in smaller vessels on the breakfast-tables and tea-trays of the "humbler classes" of London society.