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We put in at Teneriffe and take on crates of onions for twenty-four hours. Boys in boats beset us with canaries in cages, pups in sacks, and fat, wise-looking parrots on perches. The reek of onions drives out the stowaways from the hold. Onions litter the bottoms of the empty barges, squashed onions disfigure our decks. Indeed, everybody and everything smells of onions for two days.

The food is Spanish and of a sort the sailors of Columbus must have known. All is cooked in olive oil, and I notice the Cubans and Porto Ricans are not pleased if the plates do not gleam. Heaped-up plates of rice and chicken, rice and little bits of rabbit, rice and bits of beef come nearly every day, and Spanish omelettes and olive stew and remarkable dishes of highly spiced fish covered with flaming pimento. There is an excellent table wine of which there is an inexhaustible supply and it is free as air, and there is a glass of sherry for every one on Sunday evening. The Spaniards do well on this. Even little Maria Luisa, aged ten, and Ysabel, aged eight, my two best friends, have their wine and sherry and disperse with vigor the oily heaps of food. One evening these precious little girls borrowed some matches—what to do?—to finish smoking a fat Habana cigar which one of the men passengers had left on deck!