Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878, page 219 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download220
iptive powers are assisted by a number of drawings, many of which are finely done and well discriminate the local character of the different places, latitudes and circumstances of life. He does not appear to be much of a valetudinarian himself, or he would hardly have been able to venture on and report for our benefit so wide a range of travel and experience; but his preference obviously is for the island most thoroughly tempered to the needs of an enfeebled constitution, and which welcomes most wooingly those whose first craving is to keep alive--Madeira. Such of us as associate their earliest recollections of the name with the annual cask of wine will read with interest that though the wine, thanks to the oidium or some malady of that sort, is a thing of the past, the spot retains many other charms ample to justify a trip to its shores by a more roundabout way than the slow and direct or costly and circuitous routes laid down by Mr. Benjamin. Teneriffe ranks close to Madeira, and the Valley of Orotava, scooped out of the flank of the famous peak, is recommended as simply perfection for sufferers from "pulmonary complaints, rheumatism or neuralgia," and beneficial even in Bright's disease. The thermometer in this happy valley stops at fifty-eight degrees in winter, and averages from sixty-eight to seventy-two degrees in summer. Should you find this temperature too inclement, you can descend to the port at its mouth and luxuriate in a range of sixty-four to eighty degrees. Where we write the figure at this moment is ninety degrees in the shade, and those semi-tropical outposts of the anciently-known world seem arctic.
Bermuda, New York's onion- and potato-garden, is presented to us in a less fascinating light, owing possibly, in part, to the fact that Mr. B. does not like onions, and was nearly stifled on his return by the odor of that nutritious esculent under battened hatchways. But he sees a great deal to delight sound travellers, and objects mainly in behalf of the sick to the climate, which is only a