heaps of more precious kidney beans, white, brown, or mottled. The great gourds and water-melons are still in the fields where they have grown, getting their last mellowing touches of colour from the autumnal sun-rays.

It is a delightful time for all the family too. The children play at water-works, and swim oranges in the runlets of water flowing from the Nora, look out the sweetest bunches of grapes, or play at hide-and-seek in the rank growth of vegetation which the summer sun has raised. The girls saunter in the flower-garden, with its old-fashioned box-edged paths and beds well shaded by camellias and Tangerine orange trees, and filled full with flowering plants of the older fashion, the asters, the balsam, heliotrope, and scented verbena, cock's-combs, geraniums, blue and scarlet salvias, dahlias and fuchsias of the more primitive kinds, chrysanthemums, and great bushes of the yellow-flowered sedum; (all deplorable enough in the eyes of any modern gardener, but gay and bright and charming from sheer force of unchecked luxuriance.

The house is a very plain one; a square building, generally whitewashed inside and out, with broad overhanging eaves painted with vermilion underneath. Many of these houses have one large central room with a number of little cells for bedrooms, opening out on three sides. This central room, uncarpeted and furnished with a dozen or two of rickety chairs and a large deal table, is hung with monstrously bad-framed printsthe Battle of the Nile, the Saucy Arethusa,' a series showing the life and death of Pope Pius VII., the Heroism of Egaz Moniz, the Loves of Inez de Castro, or the legendary Vision of King Affonso Henriquez. Here the family meet and take their meals. An oxcart or two full of extra furniture is sent from the town

house, and serves well enough to make the family as comfortable as they care to be on their two months' picnic.

Such is the villeggiatura of the middle classes not overburdened with this world's goods. Among the country houses of wealthier people, who have been fortunate enough to buy or inherit villas of the more luxurious kind, are some magnificent and singularly hideous modern dwellings, with huge earthenware greyhounds, or wild boars, keeping guard over pretentious gateways, painted glass in the windows, and enormous balls of silvered tin perched on portentous cupolas on the house top, buildings inviting the wrath of Heaven by every enormity of bad taste-a style of architecture defying all recognised canons of art, and gardens which would be as unpleasant as the houses but that in this kindly climate Nature takes these matters into her own hands, invading the quincunx' with the luxuriance of her plant growth, violating the 'trim parterre' most satisfactorily, and making an agreeable tangle and wilderness of the most correct design.

There are, however, in Portugal, villa dwellings and gardens of the richer and more luxurious sort, of an older and better fashion than this. One such is in my, memory as I write. A stately house of plain, solid architecture, with a walled courtyard in front, wherein old orange trees overshadow the rippling surface of a stone-formed tank, into which descends a plentiful. waterfall from a carved dolphin's head.

Inside, the wood-carved wreaths and trophies on the stairs and the doorways point to the period which connoisseurs know as 'Louis Seize,' and in spite of the great secular trees about the grounds, the house, I

know, is no older than the reign of that monarch. This house is always maintained in good residential condition, fully furnished, and with a small staff of servants in occupation the whole year round. There are corridors hung with passably good oil pictures; great china cupboards, crammed full of ware purchased seemingly at all periods within the last hundred years, chiefly the handsome but comparatively worthless Oriental ware of seventy or eighty years ago; and, curious to note, next in abundance to this are the wares of our own fabriques-Crown Derby in great quantity and richness, Wedgwood, Worcester, Leeds, and even Bow and Chelsea.1

There is a handsome private chapel on the groundfloor, dedicated to St. Anthony, large enough to hold the whole parish on the saint's holiday, and here mass is said every Sunday and saint's day throughout the year. In this chapel, as in almost every private chapel I ever saw in Spain or Portugal, is that curious arrangement by which the ladies of the house can join in the service without mingling with the crowd of worshippers on the floor. A grated window, like the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Lords, about halfway up the wall, opens into one of the rooms of the house, and the ladies and children sitting there can open their windows and see and take part in, themselves unseen, all that goes on in the chapel. It is church-going made very easy. I do not know whether the practice is a remnant of old Moorish notions of women's seclusion, or comes merely from fineness and a liking to

'The long-existing commercial relations between Portugal and Great Britain growing out of the port wine trade are the cause why more last-century English porcelain and earthenware is to be found in Portugal than elsewhere in Europe.

be exclusive. One may suppose it had its origin in the old notions, and is kept up from habit and from convenience.

As in the case of the smaller villas, the house is connected with a farm, and the grounds and garden mingle in the same pleasant fashion with the appurtenances of the farmstead. A long, straight, overarching avenue of camellia and Seville orange trees terminates in a broad, paved threshing-floor. In a little dell below the house, under a dense shadow of fig and loquat trees, is the huge water-wheel, worked by six oxen, and raising a little river from the depths below. The terraced fields, the orange and olive groves and the orchards, are all surrounded by broad walks overshadowed by a heavy pleached trellis supporting vines, and here in the hottest summer's day is cool walking in the grey half-shadow of the greenery overhead. Runlets of water course along in stone channels by the side of every path and roadway, and the murmur of running water-a sound of which the ear never tires in the South-is heard everywhere and always.

The well-shaded garden is laid out in the stately Italian fashion; with carved stone-work in its terraced and balustraded walks, its flights of broad steps, and its fountains and gold-fish ponds; and here, more than anywhere, the water-threads and jets and cascades fall and rise and splash with most refreshing murmuring. There is nothing the Portuguese so much delight in as this flow of ever-moving water, cooling the air, and associated with the very idea of fertility and green luxuriance. Camoens, in his great epic, describing the enchanted Venus Island, mentions how there flows on

in it for ever, among the hollow stones of the flowerenamelled hillside,

A sonorosa lympha fugitiva,

and I rather doubt if the expressive beauty of this line would fully come home to anyone but a dweller under some such summer sky as that of Portugal. Camoens' description of the miraculous island, fine as it is, is little more than an accurate picture of many a bit of cultivated pastoral scenery in this country, and I am in truth strongly reminded of the whole passage in recalling the surroundings of the very house I am speaking of. Here, behind the house, are the green, turf-clothed hills, with the water welling everywhere, and keeping the vegetation lush and green. Here, too, is the wealth of fruit trees :

Mil arvores estão ao ceu subindo
Com pomos odoriferos e bellos :

A larangeira tem no fruto lindo
A cor que tinha Daphne nos cabellos:
Encosta-se no chão; que está cahindo,
A cidreira co' os pezos amarellos:
Os formosos limões alli cheirando.

Trees manifold here lift their branches tall,
Fruit-laden, fragrant, exquisite and rare :
The orange tree with bright-hued golden ball,
Passing the golden hues of Daphne's hair,

Citrons with weight of yellow-coated fruit
And lemons odorous

It is a far more concrete piece of description than the Italian poet gives us of Armida's magic garden, but not a less impressive one; the nymphs are very real personages indeed in the Portuguese epic, and all the sights and sounds of nature have a most bodily presentment: the very scent of the flowers and savour of the fruit are exactly set forth.