big
Portuguese is a rarity. The strong point in both sexes is their natural
gift for wearing colour, for choosing and blending or matching tints.

These Portuguese men and women work hard when they do not loaf and
chatter. The porters, who stand in knots with cords upon their
shoulders, bear huge loads; a characteristic of the place is this
load-bearing and the size of the burdens. Women carry mighty parcels
upon their heads; men great baskets. Fish is carried in spreading flat
baskets by girls. They look afar off like gigantic hats: further still,
like quaint odd toadstools in motion. All household furniture removing
among the poor is done by hand. Two or four men load up a kind of flat
hand-barrow without wheels till it is pyramidal and colossal with piled
gear. Then passing poles through the loop of ropes, with a slow effort
they raise it up and advance at a funereal and solemn pace. The slowness
with which they move is pathetic. It is suggestive of a dead burden or
of some street accident. But of these latter there must be very few;
there is not much vehicular traffic in Lisbon. It is comparatively rare
to see anything like cruelty to horses. The mules which draw the
primitive ramshackle trams have the worst time of it, and are obliged to
pull their load every now and again off one line on to another, being
urged thereto with some brutality. But these trams do not run up the
very hilly parts of the city; the main lines run along the Tagus east
and west of the great Square of the Black Horse. And by the river the
city is flat.

Only a little way up, in my street for instance, it rapidly becomes
hilly. On entering the hotel, to my surprise I went downstairs to my
bedroom. On looking out of the window a street was even then sixty feet
below me. The floor underneath me did not make part of the hotel, but
was a portion of a great building occupied by the poorer people and let
out in flats. During the day, as I sat by the window working, the noise
was not intolerable, but at night when the Lisbonensians took to amusing
themselves they roused me from a well-earned sleep. They shouted and
sang and made mingled and indistinguishable uproars which rose wildly
through the narrow deep space and burst into my open window. After long
endurance I rose and shut it, preferring heat to insomnia. But in the
day, after that discord, I always had the harmonious compensations of
true colour. Even when the sun shone brilliantly I could