a Yankee were to walk into a Portuguese
farm-house and surprise the family at dinner, he would be sure to see on
the table two articles which, however oddly served, would be in their
essentials familiar to him--Indian meal and salt codfish. Indian corn
has long been cultivated as the principal grain: it is mixed with rye to
make the bread in every-day use. The Newfoundland cod, under the name of
_bacalhau_, has crept far into the affections of the nation, its lack of
succulence being atoned for by a rich infusion of olive oil, so that the
native beef, cheap and good as it is, has no chance in comparison.
Altogether, the Portuguese peasant with his wine, his oil and his
bacalhau fares better than most of his class. At Christmas-tide he
stakes his digestion on _rebanadas_, a Moorish invention--nothing less
than ambrosial flapjacks made by soaking huge slices of wheaten bread in
new milk, frying them in olive oil and then spreading them lavishly with
honey.

The Portuguese can be industrious, but all work and no play is a scheme
of life which would ill accord with his social, pleasure-loving
temperament. With a wisdom rare in his day and generation, and an energy
unparalleled among Southern races, he manages to combine the two. After
rising at dawn and working from twelve to fifteen hours, he does not sit
down and fall asleep, but slings a guitar over his shoulder and is off
to the nearest threshing-floor to dance a _bolero_. His dancing is not
the more graceful for coming after hours of field-labor, but it lacks
neither activity nor picturesqueness: above all, it is the outcome of
light-heartedness and enjoyment in capering. The night air, soft yet
cool, is refreshing after the intense heat of the day: the too sudden
lowering of temperature at sundown which makes the evenings unhealthy in
many Southern countries is not experienced in Portugal. Every peasant
has his guitar, for a love of music is widely diffused, and some of them
not only sing but improvise. In the province of the Minho it is not
uncommon at these gatherings for a match of improvisation to be held
between two rustic bards. One takes his guitar, and in a slow, drawling
recitative sings a simple quatrain, which the other at once caps with a
second in rhyme and rhythm matching the first. Verse follows verse in
steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival
rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such
primitive pleasu