better nature overcoming his angry feelings
he produced a snuff-box and offered it to me. The snuff-box is the
olive-branch of the Portuguese, and he who wishes to be on good terms
with them, or to conciliate them, must never refuse to put his finger and
thumb into it when preferred; I took therefore a large pinch, though I
detest the dust, and we were soon friendly enough. He was eager to
obtain news, especially from Lisbon and Spain. I told him that the
officers of the regiments at Lisbon had the day before I left that place
gone in a body to the Queen, and insisted upon her either receiving their
swords or dismissing her Ministers; whereupon he rubbed his hands and
said, 'I am sure that things will not remain tranquil at Lisbon.' Upon
my saying that the affairs of Don Carlos were on the decline, he frowned,
and said that it could not possibly be, for that God was too just to
suffer it. I felt for the poor man, who had been driven from his home in
the noble convent close by, and from a state of comfort and affluence
reduced in his old age to indigence and misery, for his dwelling seemed
to contain scarcely an article of furniture. I tried twice or thrice to
induce him to converse on the school, but he always avoided the subject
or said shortly that he knew nothing about it; the idea of being a
schoolmaster was evidently humiliating to him.

On my leaving him, the boy came from his hiding-place and rejoined me; he
said his reason for hiding himself was fear that his master might know
that it was he who brought me to him, for that the old man was ashamed of
appearing in the character of a schoolmaster. I asked the boy whether he
or his parents were acquainted with the Scripture and ever read it; but
he did not understand me. I must here observe that the boy was fifteen
years of age, and that he was in many respects very intelligent and had
some knowledge of the Latin language; nevertheless he knew not the
Scripture even by name, and I have no doubt that at least one half of his
countrymen are, in that respect, no wiser than himself. I have
questioned the children of Portugal at the doors of village inns, at the
hearths of their cottages, in the fields where they labour, at the stone
Mountains by the way-sides where they water their cattle, about the
Scripture, the Bible, the Old and New Testament, and in scarcely one
instance have they known what I was alluding to or could return me a
rational answer, though in