A hint that may prove useful to any one arriving at some remote place where there is no _fonda_ is to ask to be directed to the schoolmaster. He is certain to know Spanish, may be pleased to meet a foreigner, and is sure to be able to recommend a lodging. It is to the courteous schoolmaster of Santañy that we were indebted for this suggestion.
Failing the presence of a schoolmaster, the civil guard is a good person to apply to. They are said to be a fine and absolutely reliable class of men. An artist friend chancing at nightfall to light upon a village where there was no inn, applied to the civil guard, who not only gave him a room in his own house, but appeared in the morning to offer the use of toilet appliances in the form of a comb and a pot of pomade.
The Balearic Islands appear to offer a good field to the entomologist. A friend who visited Majorca during February has given me this list of the butterflies and moths that, even at that early season, he saw in plenty, mostly within a few miles of Palma: Bath White, Cabbage or Common White, Red Admiral, Painted Lady, Clouded Yellow, Brimstone, Wall Brown, Holly Blue, Small Copper, Swallow Tail, and the Humming-bird Hawk Moth.
As the spring advanced and the giant poppies I had sown in November became a four-feet-high hedge, butterflies--strange, to me at least, and very beautiful--fluttered into the little garden of the Casa Tranquila, and probably not finding the poppies so luscious as their brilliant appearance had led them to expect, speedily fluttered out again. They did not make their home with us, as had the big locust that, in the late autumn, I captured when he was feasting on a moth in the shrubby field behind the convent. Bringing the prisoner home in my handkerchief, I set him on a pink ivy-geranium that flourished in one of the big green flower-pots on the veranda.
He seemed well content with his new quarters, for there he stayed all winter, taking up his position first in the tall scented verbena, and, when that lost its leaves, changing his perch to an adjacent almond-tree, as though he knew that would be the first to bloom.
Very early in the year he vanished, and we thought he had gone for good. But just as the first pale blossoms were opening in the almond groves he re-appeared, bringing with him the female of his species, and together in connubial amity they shared his old home in the almond-tree. When the pale rose-tinted blossoms had fallen, and the grey-green velvet pods of the young almonds were emerging from the crimson calyxes, the locust and his bride deserted us to seek a wider pasturage.