There Are Three Thousand English Living At Funchal
And Everybody Speaks English, However Slightly.
The fresh faces of
English girls met us in the streets and no doubt English invalids
abound.
We shipmates were all going to the station of the funicular railway, but
our tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a clattering
little horse-car, which climbed with us through up-hill streets and got
us to the station too soon. Within the closed grille there the
handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if
such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once,
though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a
train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be
down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most
amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we
would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off down a pink-and-cream
colored avenue near by and admired so much the curtains of
red-and-yellow flowers - a cross between honeysuckles and trumpet
blossoms - overhanging a garden-wall that two friendly boys began to
share our interest in them. One of them mounted the other and tore down
handfuls of the flowers, which they bestowed upon us with so little
apparent expectation of reward that we promptly gave them of the
international copper coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the
station doubtless feeling guiltier than they.
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