It sits in the lap of an amphitheater of hills which are three hundred to seven hundred feet high, and carefully cultivated clear to their summits--not a foot of soil left idle.

Every farm and every acre is cut up into little square inclosures by stone walls, whose duty it is to protect the growing products from the destructive gales that blow there.

These hundreds of green squares, marked by their black lava walls, make the hills look like vast checkerboards.
The islands belong to Portugal, and everything in Fayal has Portuguese characteristics about it.

But more of that anon.

A swarm of swarthy, noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gesticulating Portuguese boatmen, with brass rings in their ears and fraud in their hearts, climbed the ship's sides, and various parties of us contracted with them to take us ashore at so much a head, silver coin of any country.