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ankle that he dropped to it, and had to be restored ' before he could limp on with the party.

I do not know whether it is that the air of a Portuguese autumn day in these great sandy forests of pine or chestnut, with their gay undergrowth of aromatic shrubs, is more exhilarating than other air, and peculiarly conducive to a flow of good spirits, or whether the good humour and enjoyment come from the incidents and circumstances of a Portuguese shooting party; certain it is that the thing is most enjoyable. In describing this particular one, I am not telling of what happened on any particular day, or to any particular set of people: I could not venture upon such an impertinence to my friends to please any reader. It is a general account of a typical caçada; and those who know what such a thing is will agree that it is not unfaithful. In many a one have I joined, and, coming home again, I have sometimes compared the day's sport with one spent in English coverts. In Portugal, a pleasant day's ramble in the forest, with not much game indeed in hand at the end of it, but the lasting memory of many very surprising and unlooked-for adventures and misadventures. In England, a return homeward often wet through and chilled to the bone, having stood for hours in the sleety wind, over the ankles in mud and water, my right shoulder stiff and sore from long and monotonous shooting, perhaps my host looking black at me for having missed the solitary woodcock of the day, or for having killed more than my allowance of hen pheasants.

When French people wish to say that a party of pleasure has been successful, they sum up with the phrase, Nous avons beaucoup ri. I could always

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have made the same remark after a shooting expedition into the woods of Portugal.

It is the poet Thomson, I think, who has said that a serene melancholy is the most noble and most agreeable situation of the human mind;' but admitting all the nobility and serene delight of melancholy, that mental attitude would be a most difficult one to maintain among an enthusiastic and good-humoured party of Portuguese sportsmen out for a caçada.

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CHAPTER V.

FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE.

He who comes to Portugal in autumn in search of the picturesque must not, as a rule, expect to find it quite after the pattern to which he has become accustomed in Northern Europe. Here there is none of the calm and stately beauty of an English autumn, the leafage slowly bronzing with the early touches of frost, the russet bracken standing up in finer contrast than ever with the greenery around, and the fallen beech leaves spread like golden patines on the smooth sheep-cropped turf. This is very delightful,-and pleasant it is in the keen October air of our own country to walk out and see the slow and gradual death of the year; a summer mellowed and tempered with the coming breath of frost and snow, a winter still warm with the sun of the waning summer.

After a different fashion does autumn come upon us here in Portugal. The meeting of summer and winter is not a gradual transition, but a sudden contest. To walk out upon an autumn day is not to assist at a euthanasia, but to see the victims of a great elemental strife: the fields are fields on which a battle has been fought.

The hot Lusitanian sun has stimulated an extraordinary wealth of branch and leaf growth, and suddenly the downpour of equinoctial rain has come upon it, and the strong winds have brayed and broken everything, and covered the fields with leaves sodden and decaying already in the warm and steamy air. In the

most cultivated districts the waste and desolation are greatest, for the maize straw is mostly lying in the fields in discoloured stooks,-the most unsightly of harvests, and the vines are no longer picturesque, but their long sprays straggling where the wind has left them, and their leaves, either falling or hanging down half withered and unshapely, have lost all the rich sun-tints of summer.

The damp atmosphere which hangs over the land at this time of the year is to some susceptible constitutions a little ague-laden, and I warn the tourist against a visit to Portugal till the heat of early autumn be overpast, till the last week in October, when bright, clear weather is the rule for all the rest of the year. When St. Martin's summer begins—on or about the 11th of November-there have disappeared the very last of the mosquitoes; and though they are little troublesome in Portugal, attacking one only at night, their bite grows more and more envenomed as the summer gets older, till in September they are at their fiercest.

A far worse plague than mosquitoes is also past,the plague of flies. The present writer may claim to have done his full share of the travelling which modern society requires of its members. He has cheerfully set out on, and often more cheerfully returned from, rambles in most European countries. He has come to the conclusion that among the greatest evils of foreign travel in the South are the flies; more troublesome than beggars in Spain or donkey-boys in Egypt, worse than the inn-keepers of Germany or the brigands of Italy, greater pests even than vulgar Englishmen in Switzerland.

It is so much the fashion for modern philosophers to deal with the infinitesimal, and triumphantly to

trace great effects to small and unsuspected causes, that one may well wonder that science has so completely overlooked the influence of flies upon the destinies of the human race. The savant whose guiding principle often is de minimis curat scientia, might build up a very pretty theory upon the relations of Musca domestica and Homo sapiens, and a difference of manners, of habits, of temperament, and even of dress, might be traced between the people of countries where the house-fly is numerous and active, and countries like England where it can almost be left out of account altogether. The swarms of flies are in the South no trivial matter in the economy of life, but, though an every-day incident, one important enough to be had in serious consideration,-to be made, for instance, the subject of grave simile and comparison. When Homer is describing the heroic rally of the Trojan warriors round the dead body of Sarpedon, he does not think it beneath the dignity of the occasion to compare their numbers and their obstinacy, and the noise of their arms in fight, to the clouds of flies which

At springtime in the cattle-sheds

Around the milk-pail swarm with buzzing wings.

To take but one point:-the habit of taking a siesta, a habit in itself modifying the whole home-life and character of a people, and one which we Northerners consider so thoroughly effeminate, is certainly due not to the heat of the South, but to its flies. None but those who have suffered it can have any notion of the exasperation which is caused to a man who is the victim of a cloud of buzzing flies throughout a long summer day. Mental labour becomes quite impossible when things get to their worst, at three or four o'clock, when the afternoon is hottest and drowsiest

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