res the shepherds of the Virgilian eclogue indulged.

As the life of the peasant, so is that of his wife or sweetheart. She
shares in the work, guiding the oxen, cutting grass, even working on the
road with hoe and basket. "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound."
Like Wordsworth's reaper, she sings as she works, and the day's labor
over is ready to join in the bolero. On fete-days she is arrayed in all
the magnificence of her peasant ornaments, worth, if her family is
well-to-do, a hundred dollars or more--gold pendants in her ears, large
gold chains of some antique Moorish design falling in a triple row over
her gay bodice. The men wear long hooded cloaks of brown homespun, which
they sometimes retain for convenience after the rest of the
peasant-dress has been thrown aside for the regulation coat and
trousers. There is no tendency to eccentricity in the national costume
of Portugal, but the Portuguese colony of Madeira have invented a
singular head-gear in a tiny skull-cap surmounted by a steeple of
tightly-wound cloth, which serves as a handle to lift it by. Like the
German student's cap, it requires practice to make it adhere at the
required angle. This is a bit of coxcombry which has no match in the
simple, unaffected vanity of the Portuguese.

[Illustration: COUNTRY-HOUSE IN PORTUGAL.]

The country is left during the greater part of the year to the exclusive
occupancy of the peasantry, the town atmosphere being more congenial in
the long run to the social gentry of Portugal. The wealthy class in
Lisbon have their villas at Cintra, in which paradise of Nature and art,
with its wonderful ensemble of precipices and palaces, forest and garden
scenes, they can enjoy mountains without forsaking society. Many Oporto
families own country-houses in the Minho, and rusticate there very
pleasantly for a month or two in early fall. The gentlemen have large
shooting-parties, conducted on widely-different principles from those so
unswervingly adhered to by Trollope's indefatigable sporting character,
Mr. Reginald Dobbs. In a Portuguese shooting the number of men and dogs
is often totally disproportionate to that of the game, and a single
partridge may find itself the centre of an alarming volley from a dozen
or more guns. The enjoyment is not measured, however, by the success.
There is a great deal of talking and laughing, and no discontent with
the day's sport is exhibited even if there be little to show for the
skill a