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nor carriages and pairs, nor draught stout, nor imperial pints of pale ale, nor ginger beer, nor the hotel hairdresser, nor mulled wine at night, nor sherry bitters by day; and he reflects what a poor shuffling impostor of a guest he is to have had so few requirements.

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What may be called the antipodes of this magnificent and pretentious kind of hotel account prevails at some of the remoter inns in Portugal. Here, when the traveller asks for his bill, the landlord pleasantly rubs his hands together and answers, Whatever your Excellency pleases to give.' This will not do at all, for the traveller is sure to offer too much or too little, and to be thought either a spendthrift or a niggard ; so he has to make a speech, thank the landlord for his courteous confidence, and beg for a detailed statement.

Then the landlord, politely deprecating anything of the kind, is slowly persuaded to check off the various items upon the fingers of his hand, with a long argument before each successive finger is done with and doubled down.

'What does it come to?' asks the traveller, taking out his purse at last, when the hand and the account are finally closed.

'Diacho!' (which is polite for Diabo, which again is contracted from the Latin). 'Did his Excellency not add up?'

His Excellency having been incapable of this act of mental arithmetic, the addition is gone over again, from the little finger backwards, with a finger or two, perhaps, representing forgotten items, brought into account from the other hand; and the sum total is gladly paid, and host and guest part mutually content

-the guest well knowing that he has not been overcharged more than perhaps a thumb and one or two fingers.

At Sr. Escoven's inn the bill is drawn up and presented in a manner which may be called a compromise between these two opposite systems of account, and is an improvement on each. As I am writing as a traveller and for travellers, I can do no better than give full particulars.

At six o'clock A.M., I asked the woman servant, who was bringing my breakfast, for my bill. In less than two minutes it was placed on the table before me, written on a piece of paper two inches square. It contained only the following figures :—

1.500

1.500

3.000

The waitress, placing her finger on the second 1.500, reminded me that this sum had been advanced to me by the landlord the night before to pay my boatmen. The rest, she said, was my inn account. 1.500 reis is a milrei and a half, and a milrei and a half is about six shillings and eightpence, this sum representing the whole charge for bread and wine to take with to Troia, dinner, bed, and breakfast next morning. There was no charge for the conversation on both sides of me, which lasted half through the night.

I have written this account of a thirty-six hours' expedition from Lisbon, made hurriedly between two engagements, because I have often heard it said that little or nothing was to be done or seen from the capital of Portugal. I hope I have shown that a

traveller following me in this little expedition need expend neither much time nor trouble to find himself among very beautiful scenery and an interesting and courteous people. The Arrabida range, small as it comparatively is, has peaks and recesses which would well repay a visit of days. Setubal itself, of which I have said hardly a word, is in population the third or fourth city in the kingdom, and has antiquities of its own. The estuaries of the Sado and the Marateca, forming the Bay of Setubal, are a congregation of waters more beautiful than any in Portugal, not excepting the estuary of the Tagus itself; and upon it, within easy reach by boat, are towns famous in the history of ancient Portugal.

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA.

TEN years ago, locomotion in Portugal was certainly neither easy nor pleasant. Within that period, however, railways have increased, and a multitude of good high-roads have opened up many new and interesting districts which were once only accessible on horseback. In almost all the larger towns excellent inns have taken the place of execrably bad ones. Moreover, a system of transit has been established by a public company, under the name of the Companhia da Viação do Minho, which affords great facilities to the traveller. In all the principal cities and towns of Northern Portugal, offices of this company are to be found where, at a moment's notice, any sort of carriage can be obtained, from a roomy covered calêche to a light phaeton and the company having a well-organized system of correspondence between their various stations, the traveller can order a carriage to meet him at the most remote point of the Northern Province, with a reasonable expectation of not being disappointed.

of

It will be tolerably evident that I am describing what is, when combined with the lovely scenery Portugal and numerous points of interest of every kind, nothing less than a paradise of tourists. That it may seem still more one, the country still more accessible

and still more civilized, the reader shall learn something about Portuguese railways.

As regards the railway system of the country, it is as yet very simple, consisting of one direct main line of communication between Lisbon in the South of the Kingdom, and Oporto in the North. From each of these termini, or rather centres, there diverge short branch lines, or feelers, which are still, except at two points in the South, unconnected with the railway system of the rest of the Peninsula, and which are for the most part in process of annual extension.

It is along one of these branch lines, and the newest of them all, the railway opened within the last few months northward to Braga and thence to the Spanish frontier, that I am about to conduct the reader. Though the distance from Lisbon to Oporto is very nearly that between Liverpool and London, the time employed for the journey in Portugal is considerably more than double; and as competition may be called the soul of brevity in railway matters, and there is quite certain to be no competition in Portugal for the next hundred years, Lisbon and Oporto may, for all intents and purposes, be considered to be, not two hundred, but four hundred miles apart.

I pass over this journey without comment, for my present purpose is to visit, first Braga, the archiepiscopal city, and afterwards Guimaraens, famous in the history of medieval Portugal, and to find, and when found, to explore and make notes of, a mysterious buried town, supposed to lie somewhere between these two cities, and of which a great deal more presently.

The Minho Province is, as everyone knows who has ever opened a book upon Portugal—even a guide-book

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