remain on our decks, we drop down the Tagus
towards Lisbon; we drop past Belem, that
little filagree matchpot of a tower, with its
enriched windows of Moorish origin, its
twisted cable cornices, and pierced balconies;
we pass the convent built to celebrate Vasco
de Gama's Indian discovery; we drop along
the grand river, past white, dusty-looking
hills covered with olives, and flocks of wind-
mills. We pass, on the other hand, curious
earth-cliff banks and small villages that seem
to have come down to the great river-side to
drink. Far away, behind us, we leave Belem
guarding the entrance of the green and
frothy river, the distant Torres Vedras
lines, the Saint Julian fort that Wellington
strengthened, and the taper tower beyond
the bar, where the surf runs threateningly.

Now we pass more houses and convents,
yellow, and blue, and rose-coloured buildings;
and the great sloping-terraced city
of Lisbon runs down the hill-side to meet us.
We have reached the great red egg-shaped
buoy of the Peninsula and Oriental Company's
steamers, opposite the Black Horse Square;
where a mounted bronze statue, like that
of the Commandante in Don Juan, stands on
guard. A flock of dragon-fly boats surround
us, the crews jabbering out the names of
rival hotels. "Let go the anchor!" says the
captain with the yellow whites to his eyes,
and the signal-gun voice. The chain runs
out with a clattering shaking jolt, over goes
the anchor, in a headlong suicidal way,
striking up a white flood of water, like a
dying whale. We are anchored. The mail-
agent has gone ashore with his great leather
saddle-bags of letters. We may land. Lisbon
is all before us, where to choose.

I land—not at Black Horse Square, haunted
by boatmen—but am paddled by John Fish, a
young Massaniello of Lisbon, to the wet steps
of the Praga dos Romulares, a pretty little
tropical square quite to the left, near the great
arsenal; where the Portuguese seamen of a
war fleet (which exists only on paper) are
trained. There are spiked aloes, and orange,
and pimento trees, about it in tubs and
oil-jars; and, in the middle of the square, which is
paved with black and white pebbles in mosaic,
so as to resemble the dial face of a compass,
the rays being some thirty feet long. In the
centre, is the marble pillar with the sun
clock; round which merchants sit and smoke
cigarettes, or rough sea captains stand
discussing the rig of their ships in the Tagus
bay, not a boat's length off. All round
this square are lodging-houses, hotels, and
country houses, where men sit poring over
books, cigar in mouth and pen in hand;
and, high over all is, not the citadel of Saint
George, but the great Braganca Hotel, with
its square, tall block of rose-coloured building
against the burning blue of a dazzling sky.
We mount from this mosaic-paved square, its
flowers, and chattering smoking groups, up
the steep Rua di Aligrima, which rises
straight into the sloping city. We meet jolting
oxen, leaning against each other, and drawling
along with a cart, which is nothing
but a heavy wooden slab, graduses of cafés,
shops, and dwelling-houses, intersected here
and there by cross traversas, or alleys,—the
river still ever hot and blue in sight behind
us. On our right hand, the wall goes up
by steps, till it stretches in an unbroken
expanse of some fifty feet high, broad as a
fortress, and no chink even for a quick-eyed
lizard to hide in. At the top are some black
spiked cypresses, and a square bower trellis,
green-rooted with vines. Higher up still, in
this place, where one might expect to see
some Don Quixote duchess, is a grating that
shows it is the convent of the Heart of
Jesus; and I stand at the corner of
the Rou de Sant Domingos, reading the
placard of a bull-fight at Saint Anna (or
rather Vilafranca), which is a good fifteen
miles off by railway, and am now—having
sifted this—wandering off to an illustrated
placard representing the Dutch giant, standing
in full evening costume, with his legs in
a tub, together with an English sailor, rather
caricatured, making a seal (called in the bills
Sea Monster) dance upon its tail, in a manner
that is a caution to mermaids. I look back
from these appeals to the senses—which some
ugly Portuguese in black hats tasselled with
black puffs are intently reading—towards the
great broad bay, and the crowd of boats, with
their barber-pole masts tufted and striped
red and yellow. Swallows skim round us,
and reconnoitre that house beyond the
convent, that seems crusted with slabs of blue
China, for flies. It is all but breastplated
with blue figured tiles, in a way worthy of
Nankin and Chingfou. Some negroes—their
black faces bound up with yellow handkerchiefs
—pass us; and, all of a sudden, they
cross themselves and look up; for, as through
the grating like a perfume, gushes out a
hymn of the Church, with such simple purity,
so uncadenzaed and unrouladed that it might
be the song of angel children.

We stand entranced with expectancy, all
ear. We were all but swept away by the
storming Badajoz diligence, which—regardless
of our being English: one of that
nation that had once something to do with,
that Badajoz—tore pompously and overbearingly
round the corner, and nearly made an
omelette of the votary of Church music, just
as he was thinking what a capital way of
making signals to a nun you were in love with
it would be to toss up an orange through that
black grating. The immense hearse of a 'bus
—I mean the Badajoz diligence—is steered by
a post-boy; a little fellow in immense jack-boots,
which seem to slowly swallow him up,
and a large white hairy hat that would quite
extinguish his face, but for fierce tossings
back, as he rows on with his booted elephantiasis
legs.

I go up a side street, where the ground