it might well have served for saddle-cloths to
the Buccaneers, as tradition says they dressed their meat under their
saddles. However that may be, the beef is good. Here the common mode of
using it is to cut it in small squares, and boil it in the mandioc
pottage, which is the principal food of the poorer inhabitants and the
slaves.

[Note 60: The convents are, generally speaking, the places where the
more delicate preserves are made. Those I bought were of Guava, cashew
apple, citron, and lime. The cashew particularly good. They go by the
general name of _Doce_.]

After I had ended my marketing, I went to call on a Portuguese family,
and as it was the first private Portuguese house I had been in, I was
curious to notice the difference between it and the English houses here.
The building and general disposition of the apartments are the same, and
the drawing-room only differed in being better furnished, and with every
article English, even to a handsome piano of Broadwood's; but the
dining-room was completely foreign; the floor was covered with painted
cloth, and the walls hung round with English prints and Chinese
pictures, without distinction of subject or size. At one end of the room
was a long table, covered with a glass case, enclosing a large piece of
religious wax-work; the whole _praesepia_, ministering angels, three
kings, and all, with moss, artificial flowers, shells and beads,
smothered in gauze and tiffany, bespangled with gold and silver, San
Antonio and St. Christopher being in attendance on the right and left;
the rest of the furniture consisted of ordinary chairs and tables, and a
kind of beaufet or sideboard: from the ceiling, nine bird-cages were
hanging, each with its little inhabitant; canaries, grey finches with a
note almost as fine, and the beautiful widow-bird, were the favourites.
In larger cages in a passage room, there were more parrots and paroquets
than I should have thought agreeable in one house; but they are
well-bred birds, and seldom scream all together. We were no sooner
seated in the dining-room, than biscuit, cake, wine, and liqueurs, were
handed round, the latter in diminutive tumblers; a glass of water was
then offered to each, and we were pressed to taste it, as being the very
best in Recife; it proceeds from a spring in the garden of the convent
of Jerusalem, two miles from town, and the only conduit from that spring
leads to the garden of a sister convent here. From the lady,