DIET OF THE POOR.

177

and last of all the sexton, with a handful of extinguished tapers and a white cup of holy water, cleared the ground of the few children who lingered in it, shut the iron gates, and slowly walked away.

February 18.-The diet of the poor is chiefly vegetable. We have had an opportunity of seeing and of tasting a very common dish among labouring people here. A fisherman and his family were at supper in a cottage into which we went a day or two ago, and they were eating out of a brown dish, what seemed to be a somewhat savoury mess. It consisted of potatoes chopped small and in small quantities, cabbages, a few beans, fennel, and a little Indian-corn bread, boiled together with lard, and eaten hot. It was poor heartless compost to rear fine men upon, and yet the men are a muscular race, and often handsome as well as athletic. The beauty of the women also is frequently considerable, and their figures are unexceptionable; but mothers at sixteen -"bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried,' with the wear and tear of hard labour, and boundless spirits, cannot fail to lose their figures and good looks prematurely, and to look old, when in years they are quite young.

VOL. I.

N

178

VILLA FRANCA BEGGARS.

A message to-day from our washerwoman, who, I presume, is of a religious turn of mind, was rather startling to us Protestants. "She would be much obliged to us, if, as we were making sketches of other things, we would have the kindness to sketch her a picture of the crucifixion."

To-day we have been kept within doors by rain until the afternoon; and it being Saturday, which is a day sacred to beggars, we have had several of them moaning and praying at the door, which they commonly do until they get a copper or a piece of bread. These withered and tattered mendicants, each of whom seems to have collected in her own rueful face and woollen cloak

all the outward signs of age and poverty, and might even be suspected of having crossed a broomstick, exceed even Irish beggars in patient endurance. Their strength is to sit still; and they will wait on a staircase or at a gate for more than an hour, in dismal expectation of the smallest pittance. They endure, too, with unmoved patience, the process of standing or squatting for likenesses, -our usual and only sine quá non to their weekly dole of bread or halfpence. The destruction of the monasteries and religious houses has much interfered with the livelihood of these rheumatic and destitute old women.* But we have seldom been detained at home by the rain;

* Able-bodied vagrants are not allowed in the Azores. Such persons are liable to be imprisoned; and on conviction may be transported, or employed on the public works. The decrees by which these provisions are made, have had a useful effect in exterminating vagrancy in these islands. Mendicity is confined to the aged and infirm poor and to the crippled and blind, for whom there is no legal provision. They are therefore dependent on the charity of the wealthy, to whom they make a weekly application and receive alms. Whatever surplus food remained after the Friars and Nuns had dined, was distributed among them at the convent gates; and this continues to be the case at the two or three convents which remain. (Read's Report to the Poor Law Commissioners, 1834, vol. xxxix, Appendix F. p. 643.)

although this is the season when wet may be expected. Our experience in this respect very much tallies with that of an old gentleman who spent most of his life in St. Michael's, and died at a very advanced age, who frequently said, that although a considerable quantity of rain fell in the island, in the course of the year, he never knew a day pass in which it was not possible to walk between the showers.

CHAPTER X.

Life hath its May, and all is mirthful then:

The woods are vocal, and the flowers all odour;

Its very blast has mirth in 't, and the maidens

(The while they don their cloaks to screen their kirtles) Laugh at the rain that wets them.

Spargens rore levi.

WALTER SCOTT.

NEID, lib. vi.

Carnival.- Water Sprinkling. Procession of Terceiros.

Lent.

Sermons.

FEBRUARY 19.-The carnival is over, and we are now in Lent. The amusement of all who are "amusable" has been throwing and squirting water over each other. We were somewhat sur

prised during the first day of the carnival to see a group of young men attacking a house near a fountain. With all kinds of machines for throwing water, from pitchers to pumpkins, they were besieging the inmates, who, from the balcony, re