floors of the gentlemen's houses seem all
stables; you can nose them as you pass, and
hear the horses dragging at their chain halters,
or pounding with restless feet at the straw. At
one door, there is a heavy patient-looking
bullock being shoed, surrounded by an anxious,
idle set of sympathising friends of the
smith; who, with his leathern apron on, looks
at the crescent-split hoof with the serious air
with which a dentist looks for flaws in your
teeth, hoping to find them, or determined to
invent them. Those men standing in a row,
with small barrels on their shoulders, at the
long manger-like fountain under the wall, are
the honest and industrious Gallegos, or Gallicians,
the serfs and Gibeonites of the Lisbonese.
They hew their wood and draw their water,
and all to get back to the green hills of Vigo,
with some money to marry with. Ask a
Portuguese to carry your carpet-bag to the
boat at the Black Horse Square, and he will
say, "I am not a Gallego. God made the
Portuguese first," says the proverb, "and
then made the Gallegos to wait upon them."
You see them in the steep side streets of a
morning, going off to supply their family with
water. They are like the Caddies in Edinburgh,
or what the Swiss used to be in Paris.
They are simple-hearted, quiet, brave working
fellows, worth a dozen lazy Portuguese.
There are more than three thousand of them
in Lisbon. I pass some doors where tough,
dry, knotty olive-roots are for sale as fire-wood,
and pass a barefooted, sturdy country
boy, who carries—at either end of a long slender
pole, balanced on the shoulder of his pink
shirt—a shallow, broad basket of dusty velvet
peaches and transparent amber grapes. Some
sailors in canvas shoes, come out fresh from
the wine-shop; their collars far back on their
broad shoulders, their black-silk handkerchiefs
carefully tied with white cord. (They
are Spitfires, you see, by the gold-lettered
bands on their caps.) They gather round the
grinning boy, and empty his store, flinging
the soppy peach-skins at the pariah street
dogs, lean and wandering, with which Lisbon
abounds, quite as much as it does with tropical
flowers and loathsome smells, that seem
to wait to knock you down at street corners.
Now pass—what are they?—six nuns;
grave-looking women, with white, starched,
linen head-cloths pinned over the forehead,
and stretching out behind, in long peaks. They
are draped, hot as it is, with long caped
dark cloaks, such as the Irish women use; and,
indeed, in face and manner look not unlike
them. There is no touch of colour about
them: grave, still as mutes, and so ugly and
soul-less, that I think no country but Portugal,
with its mean, half-Jewish race, could match
them. As for the men, they have none of the
Spanish fire, none of the Andalucian kingly
spirit and independence. Monks I see not;
for they are abolished, and the priests are only
distinguished by wearing pantaloons and
Hessian boots. Alas, the donnas have modified
the mantilla, and the fatal French bonnet
is creeping in, to the destruction of the
national black veil and the fan parasol.

I am bound for the Post Office, which lies
up a quiet side street; at one end of which
there are great gates as of some grandee's
mansion. I enter the office by a court: a sort of
hall, with folding doors and rooms on either
side. The place is pigeon-holed all round,
and I read over two of the boxes, "Teneriffe
and Pernambuco," which reminds me where I
am. The English Admiralty agent, in gold-laced
cap and blue uniform, enters as I leave
with the prize of a letter, followed by his
coxswain and another sailor in blue jerseys,
toiling up the steep street with our leather
bags on their backs.

I toil up still higher, to Saint Roque; and,
pushing by a flapping red curtain, enter the
church, where beggar women and ladies
kneel side by side; a crutch and gilt fan
alternating on the pavement, before a glittering
side chapel that seems dug out of solid gold.
It is a metal cave, indeed, ponderously rich.
These reckless street dogs run and sniff in
and out of the church, vulgarly careless and
restless among the worshippers; whose eyes
turn from the altar to the door whenever
any one enters. The ceiling is of painted
linen, and a tawdry green orchestra blocks up
one end of the building, where perhaps poor
dying Henry Fielding strolled and wondered.
There was the great novelist's grave on the
hill of the Estrella, where the dark cypresses
we saw peering up, stood like black marks of
admiration.

I observe that the special charm of Lisbon,
apart from its orange trees, public gardens,
and rows of red coral berried pimentos
—is its almost Chinese and eastern character.
Apart from the crowd of black faces, sunburnt
with red yellow that you see, there is a
tropical glow of colour all over the city. The
roofs consist of a curious ridge-and-furrow
tile that is quaint of outline. They go
up into pagoda-like crescents, and have
figured curving finials that are Chinese and
fantastic. The shop-walls too, facing the
street, are frequently panelled with blue
porcelain tiles, which seem just fresh from
Canton. Indeed the Portuguese were the first to
import Dragon jars, China punch-bowls and
tea-cups. Sometimes private houses, big as
palaces, shine with these rude blue mailings;
and, as for green and gilt balconies, they
hang out everywhere; and ten to one but,
on the third or fourth tier of them, there is
a row of red oil-jars, forming the base to a
thicket of oleanders, gorgeous with a wealth
of purple bloom. Twenty to one but, half
way up in a gilt cage, hangs a Brazilian
parrot, green and red, or grey and scarlet,
chatting, listening, or thoughtful. Sometimes
the yellow straw mats or green blinds are
trailed over the balcony ledge, so as to form
a sort of porch or tent to the shaded room,
where the donnas and some portly priest