s give a fresher insight into a great man than the more
important facts of his biography, so the ploughing, harvesting and
singing of a Portuguese peasant, with their bucolic simplicity, bring
the life of the ancients a little nearer to us than the sight of their
great aqueducts and columns. But the nineteenth century is striking the
death-blow of the bucolic very fast, the world over, and Portugal is
awake and bestirring herself--not the less effectively that she is
making no noise about it. Nevertheless, she is becoming better known.
Mr. Oswald Crawfurd, the English consul at Oporto, who has lived in
Portugal for many years, is writing about it from the best point of
view, half within, half without. His book of travels published under the
pseudonym of Latouche, and a volume entitled _Portugal, Old and New_,
recently issued under his own name, throw a strong, clear light upon the
country and its inhabitants. Another sympathetic and entertaining
traveller is Lady Jackson, the author of _Fair Lusitania_.

[Illustration: CHURCH PLATE IN BRAGA CATHEDRAL.]

The Portugal of Mr. Crawfurd and Lady Jackson is a different land from
that which Southey, Byron and other English celebrities visited at the
beginning of this century: it is not the same which Wordsworth's
daughter, Mrs. Quillinan, travelled through on horseback in 1837, making
light of inconveniences and looking at everything with kind, frank eyes.
Lisbon is no longer a beautiful casket filled with dirt and filth, but a
clean, bright and active city, and Portugal is no longer a sleeping
land, but a well-governed country, which will probably be hindered by
its small natural proportions, but not by any sluggishness or incapacity
of its people, from taking a high place among European nations.

A GRAVEYARD IDYL.

In the summer of 187-, when young Doctor Putnam was recovering from an
attack of typhoid fever, he used to take short walks in the suburbs of
the little provincial town where he lived. He was still weak enough to
need a cane, and had to sit down now and then to rest. His favorite
haunt was an old-fashioned cemetery lying at the western edge of the
alluvial terrace on which the town is built. The steep hillside abuts
boldly on the salt marsh. One of the cemetery-paths runs along the brink
of the hill; and here, on a wooden bench under a clump of red cedars,
Putnam would sit for hours enjoying the listless mood of convalescence.
Where the will remains pas