tectural tourist in the world must stop to admire it, and try to understand why it is so beautiful. Its height is divided by three horizontal string-courses, and on the summit are set pinnacled crenelations. The upper string-course, running along the second course of ashlar from the top, is set with gargoyles; the other two are plain. Between the two upper string-courses is the belfry, containing a peal of eight bells, two showing through the double-pointed arched window openings on each side of the tower. Each corner of the tower is carved in a twisted cable ornament, running perpendicularly, and giving a singular air of finish and relief to the whole. This moulding is relieved by a carved grotesque head between the two upper string-courses, and a gargoyle half way between the two lower ones. Later additions to the tower are an outrageous little conical spire, now whitewashed, and an ecclesiastical coat of arms between the two lower string-courses, of a date not much later than the tower, and contemporary probably with the crenelated work on its summit.

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Guimaraens is a delightful old town, full of rarely picturesque bits' for an artist-old Azimel' windows, telling of Moorish influences; narrow alleys, with the eaves of opposite houses all but meeting overhead; colonnaded streets; old doorways, with queerly carved mouldings; lights and shadows everywhere to delight a Rembrandt, and some of the street vistas terminating in a grand view of the mountain-side, white in places with the bloom of fruit-trees, green with waving patches of rye and clover among the grey boulders; and here and there the waters of rills and rivulets are seen tumbling in foaming cascades down the steep hillside.

The tourist or traveller might do worse than make Guimaraens his headquarters for a while. There is now at Guimaraens an excellent hotel-where there used to be only very bad ones-I forget its name, but it is in a square nearly opposite the church already described, and will be known to all drivers and others as the Hospedaria Nova-the New Inn. There are high roads from the city in all directions, all leading through lovely scenery, mostly mountainous, to interesting cities; and these roads are so uniformly good that there is not the slightest temptation to do what a driver in Ireland of old days once proposed to his fare when at last he had come to a tolerable mile of road, 'Won't I drive your honour back over this last bit again, just for the delight of it?' There used to be, and for that matter still are, roads in Portugal which make this story intelligible, but in those about Guimaraens there is now a positive monotony of excellence.

Go where he will in Portugal, the traveller should he provided with Murray's Hand-Book. To be sure there are great omissions in it, and some things to which omissions would have been far preferable-but as a guide book it is facile princeps among such biblia abiblia, whether English, French, or German. It is comparatively far more useful and more trustworthy than the others. I lay claim to some generosity for saying this, for in an enlarged and amended edition Mr. Murray has called me some very unkind names, simply because I set him right in a most astounding blunder about Lucius Junius Brutus and the historian Livy. Mr. Murray, after correcting the blunder (without acknowledgment), adventured a dreadful insinuation to the effect that he did not believe I was myself very thoroughly conversant with the works of

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Livy. Although there was nothing in my text to ground this very grave charge upon, I am ashamed to say it is well founded. I am not well read in Livy.

CHAPTER IX.

A PORTUGUESE COLONY.

THE ship that leaves the shores of Great Britain in October or November, and steers due south, does not leave fog and leaden skies, and cold winds, and driving rain and sleet well behind her until she has crossed the storm-vexed Bay of Biscay, and passed Cape Finisterre, the Land's End of Spain. Then, as a rule, the sky clears, the wind dies, and the sea, no longer lashed into surge and foam, reflects the serenity of the heavens in its own darker bosom.

Travelling on south through these summer seas for nearly a thousand miles after leaving the Bay, we sight the land of our destination, the Purple Islands, as the ancients are fabled to have named them-Madeira and the islets adjacent. The first to rise from the sea is Porto Santo; then, some forty miles further west, Madeira itself, and the Desertas Islands.

It has been disputed whether these islands were indeed those anciently known as the Purple Islands, and it has been further questioned whether the epithet 'purple' is applicable to their appearance, or to the fact that a purple dye can be obtained from a lichen which still grows in great abundance at Madeira, and is known in commerce as Orchilla Weed.

It requires no little exercise of faith to believe that the ancients ever had discovered these islands, and a good deal more to accept the theory of this anticipation by 2,000 years of our comparatively modern invention. of the purple orchil dye.

If they knew the islands at all, and knew them as the Purple Islands, it is probable that they applied this name to Madeira on account of the dark and almost purple colour of the volcanic cliffs which border the sea shore, towering in places into peaks which mimic the turrets of a castle, in others rising sheer up for hundreds of feet from the water's edge like huge walls of masonry, or forming quaint jutting pinnacles and bosses of dark stone: so dark, indeed, that if, as the traveller comes near, a cloud happens to intercept the sun's rays, these sea-facing rocks look as if they had been washed with an inky rain. Only when the sun shines upon them do their true colours show-here a jasper-like red, there a green vivid with moss and weeds, there with the tones of burnished bronze, and again through infinite gradations of greys and violets, to where the line of white foam divides them from the blue sea.

The ship which steers for Madeira passes the last promontory, the Brazen Head, and enters the little Bay of Funchal, safe lying for ships in all winds except when it blows from the south, for the hills behind the town rise in an amphitheatre to a height nearly as great as that of Snowdon, and keep off the north, the east, and the west wind not from the town alone, but from the whole bay. A curious sight is often seen from the houses of the town-a tempest-tossed vessel two or three miles out in the offing, where the billows